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Two Contrary Dimensions
John R Gavazzoni
Thousand Oaks, CA
In the past 53 plus years since the Lord called me to Himself, nothing has challenged my understanding more, and nothing has drawn me into deep reflection and meditation more than the apparent contradiction between how God knows me and affirms me, and what I constantly am confronted with that, as it were, screams at me, "Don't you dare lay claim to completeness in Christ; why, look at yourself, it's obvious that, not only are you not complete in Him, your demonstrable incompleteness pales before your hideous hypocrisy."
Yet, time after time, He calls me to Himself to lay my head on his chest and hear Him whisper, "It's true, really true; don't listen to the lie. I do not recognize, I do not know you other than the man you are in Christ. All that stands in contradiction to that, though it may lay claim to being you, is a lie incarnate."
There is a religious approach that tries to answer this conundrum by asserting that all evil is an illusion; the beggars on the streets of Calcutta, crack babies, the mother and father desperately trying to go on with life after the loss of a precious child, the political prisoner enduring hideous torture at the hands of inhuman monsters, the paraplegic victim of war, all those suffering endless hours of physical or emotional pain for one reason or another, all this, supposedly, is an illusion, a bad dream from which we are exhorted to awake. In fact, it is claimed that even space and time and materiality are an illusion. There is only goodness and God.
I reject this "answer" of "Christian Science." It is intellectually lazy and theologically unsubstantial. It is a religious and philosophical exercise in denial. But I do recognize that it has rushed in to fill a vacuum left by the institutional church's failure to see and speak with authority from our real vantage point at the right hand of God. It is a failure to take the high ground of revelation and from there to explain what lies "under the sun."
Rather than there being the contrast of truth and illusion, the actual contrast is between truth and delusion, between the truth which is in Christ, and the lie that opposes that truth. I will be making a clear distinction between the dimension of truth, which in biblical terms carries the idea of reality and genuinness, and the dimension of actuality. There is truth (reality), and there is existential actuality. They are distinct dimensions.
Our existential actuality was deliberately made vulnerable to becoming hostile to reality, and in fact, has done so. You see a thing can be contrary to the truth and still have existential actuality, that is, it exists, but its existence is composed of a lie. If you unzipper it and look inside, you'll say, "Look, it's all a lie, the whole thing is satan's hot air."
In our creation transition, when we, as those eternally begotten of God in Christ, entered the aeons from eternity, and became materially formed, we were subjected to that which is alien to our true being (I do not mean by that, that our materiality is alien to our true being; it is subect to alienation.) You see, we must not equate aeonian fact with eternal truth. The truth is eternal, but the lie is transitory, it "appears for a while and then vanishes away."
If our perspective is a biblical one, we realize that truth is much more sublime than fact. Scripture reserves the title, "Truth," for Christ. All that stands in contradiction to who and what He is, and whom and what He includes in Himself, falls under the category of delusion, or the lie. The lie has existence, and in its obsession to counterfeit the economy of God, it births a counter incarnation. It is not a real birth, for only truth can genuinely give birth. It is a "birthing" by vain imagination, giving it, by some definition, a substantiality in the space-time continuum.
Christ is the Truth. In Him, incarnately, the fulness of Deity and the totality of humanity live in the eternal bliss of perfect oneness. In the lie, that which God is not, and that which is the false persona of man, walks about in bodily form, illegitimately laying claim to the members of our body which, in truth, are "instruments of righteousness." It clings to our outer man so that we do not appear to be like Christ.
But "when He shall appear", when His brilliance shall shine through and dissolve the veneer, "we shall be like Him for we shall see him as He is." We shall see Him as He is, as being who we are, that is, as including in Himself our true self, thus we shall be as we really are. In this out-shining, even the lying imposter shall be reconstituted by the glory of God, for the lie does not stand on its own; being the distortion of the truth, it must return to its original form .
All this is of God, who has designed that we become fully rooted in who we really are by having to deal with an actual, existential, but not Real, counterfeit of ourselves. This personified sin, this embodiment of missing the mark, must be faced and acknowledged, not denied. This is the message of the first chapter of John's first epistle. Don't deny it, confess its existence. You do "have" it, but it is not you.
Under God, you have been given the responsibility to be rid of it, to gain the victory over this lie. Christ has and will conquer it in you. In confessing your sin, confess it as what it is, a fabrication of yourself. Left to yourself, you did succumb to it in your aeonian existence, and it became manifest as to what we will do if left to ourselves.
That was necessary for us; a most important lesson to learn. But if you confess it as native to your God-generated being, you are confessing a lie, for it is alien to who you are. Understand that we are not cleansed by denying that we have sinned. That was the gnostic error that John was addressing. We are cleansed by the precious blood of Christ that speaks better things than the blood of Abel.
Conventional evangelical theology tends to equate sin-nature with human nature. Sin nature is alien to human nature. The divine nature, given to us in Christ is native to our humanness. We must conquer sin and death, and conqueror them we will, because they have been conquered. Yes, that's exactly what I said, we will conqueror them, because they already have been conquered by Christ.
We proceed from victory and go on to victory. We are not gaining a victory that is not yet, we are gaining a victory has been and now is. Sin and death have been defeated, so go forth to defeat them. That's the logic of the kingdom of God, not the logic of the natural mind. We do not defeat Satan because he is not yet defeated, we defeat him because he already has been defeated at the cross. Hallelujah! Death has been abolished and life and immortality have been brought to light by the gospel.
If you bring sin and death to light, under the light they clearly are revealed as the lie that they are. Have you noticed that Jesus not only said that the devil was a liar, but that he was the father of lies. See, if you father lies, that makes you a lie. Get that: We father what we are. Everyone of my kids is a Gavazzoni, because I'm a Gavazzoni. God fathers the truth because He is the Truth. Satan fathers lies because he is the lie.
Take a step back from all those things that claim to represent who you are, and calmly, under the blood of Christ and while aware of being the righteousness of God in Him, look at them, and say, "I know who you are, and I will no longer be intimidated by you."
Walk in the light and those things will not be able to come near you, for you are born of the incorruptible Seed of God. We cannot enter into the habitual, continual practice of sin like the world, for we are not of the world, His Seed abides in us, and as He is, so are we in this world.
Stay tuned for future serious, seminal samplings.
John Gavazzoni
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John R Gavazzoni
758 N. Woodlawn Dr.,
Thousand Oaks, CA 91360.
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