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Paul's Two "Ins" Part Two
The Christ Code
John R Gavazzoni
Thousand Oaks, CA
Having virtually no understanding of what exactly is the relationship of genes, chromosomes and DNA, and how those biological components of the cellular life-form called human combine to make us biologically the unique, individual versions of animal life that each of us turns out to be, I am vaguely aware that those components are quite intrinsic to our biological development and that a living code is built into each of us that by some definition instructs our bodies at the cellular level, quite determinatively---given no interruptive and disruptive anomalies---as a sort of biological equivalent to theological predestination.
The parallel deserves much consideration, remembering that the Bible does not teach predestination to heaven or hell, but predestination to conformity to the image of Jesus Christ. Over a period of many months recently, I searched for an illustration that would help clarify for God's people just how it is that we are complete in Christ since there seems to be a mountain of apparent and stubborn contradictory evidence facing us as we seek to lay hold of Paul's complete-in-Christ thesis.
In my search, I found myself returning time and time again to the aforementioned---at least to my thinking--- parallel. Paul is quite clear and emphatic in his thesis that, in the Person and experience of Jesus Christ, is found both the reality of human being and personhood, and the arrival at, the fulfillment of, the goal of humanness. In a word, Jesus Christ is the Origin and Destiny of Humanness as Herman C. Waetjen expounds in his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew.
Paul reckons that who we are has already been determined in Christ, and the fulfillment of our God-ordained destiny has already been accomplished in Him. By revelation, he has come to understand the same to be the truth universally and individually with the inspired, confident expectation of a sovereignly-elected, sovereignly-ordered unfolding rank by rank.
Paul and John, especially, understand that all Deity and all humanity have been gathered together and summed up in Jesus Christ. As the Son of God, He is the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and in Him resides the fulness of humanity as the Son of Man. By the Holy Spirit, in communion with the virgin, Mary, all of Godness---with its core-humanness--- birthed Itself into a single summation of all humanity, Jesus of Nazareth.
So is humanity one or many? The answer is, both, for gathered together and summed up in the Person of Christ, the oneness of humanity appeared in its irreducible essence among the many from whom that essence was drawn.
When, in the fulness of the times, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, every descendant of Adam, whether they were then present or in the past, or in the future, every one was present in that One. He is the many as One, yet the many are still many, but one in Him. To help us understand something of this mystery, science comes to our aid in its growing understanding of what makes us who we are.
Regularly we hear of law enforcement determining identity by an individual's DNA taken from even just a hair, from bodily fluids and the like, because, in a very real sense, the person is in the DNA---as I understand it to contain our genetic code.
Imagine science extracting some DNA from a person, altering it in such a way as to repair all damage it has incurred, restoring it to its pristine wholeness, AND building into it, to the extent that science alone can, an invulnerability to abnormality, and a restorative quality making it the source of an entirely renewed, even- better-than-original individual, then injecting that DNA back into that man or woman so that in time, the extracted, altered and reintroduced DNA would overcome the former genetic code and transform that person into a new creation.
So it is with our Lord Jesus Christ. He is, as it were, in His unique Personhood, the genetic code of Deity and Humanity, who is wonderfully, both the origin of humanness from eternity. and who, in the aeon, was drawn forth out of that humanity of which He was the Source to undergo an all-inclusive divine/human experience of aeonian living with all the elements common to human experience (without sin), even to the humiliation, suffering and death by that crucifixion in which all human woe in the extreme finds its culmination and consummation.
He was entombed as One clearly dead, but death could not hold Him, and He arose victorious over that ancient and ultimate enemy going on to return to the glory which He had with the Father before the world was, and in that return, He reconciled all men in Himself even IN their enmity, so that enmity, the essence of death, itself became the enhancement of the glory of God.
The glory of God, in it all, draws forth from Itself a magnification of itself by the soul of humanness, as Love returns all things to their primal constitution, and on to the inherent glory of that constitution, the glory of the Son(s) of God's love.
All this was accomplished in the divine/human DNA of us all. Christ, in the Spirit, is that DNA of and for us all, drawn out from humanity, now including the human experience designed by God from eternity, reintroduced sequentially into the whole body, and bodies of humanity until, in us, what we are in that altered DNA---which He is---takes over and makes us by Him in us, what we are in Him.
It has become fashionable in popular Christian sermonizing to get a hook into people by asserting that we all have a wonderful, fulfilling personal destiny laid out for us in Christ from before the foundation of the world; but in all the sermons I have heard and read of this genre, they all, with theological timidity, contain a very prevalent thread of uncertainty, since it is a firmly held belief in (pseudo) orthodoxy, that, after all, there is an opposing, alternate destiny and, in the end, it is you who determines which will be yours.
It is held to be incontestable, that you must do your part in it all so that God can do His part. In short, God will be faithful according to your faithfulness. Beware of that insidious dogma that insists that the faithfulness of man, or the lack of the same, is what finally determines whether God can have His Way with us.
Brethren---brethren of the community of faith, AND brethren who are still in this world---the Christ Code has been implanted in us in terms of both corporate and individual destiny, and we shall flesh it out because of "...God, which worketh in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure." Phil 2 13 That implanted enChristing Code shall be activated in us by God as He deems it timely in His dealing with each individual.
All interruptive and disruptive anomalies were dealt with on the cross, and such elements were incorporated into our Christ DNA. So it is that we can really say in Truth that we are complete in Christ. If perchance, the reader has not been able to completely follow my thought throughout this humble attempt to illustrate a great mystery, I will close with my own affirmation of the Pauline thesis: What is true of us in Christ, will become true of us by Christ in us. The Reality shall become the existential actuality, and "we shall be changed...." 1 Cor 15:21
Stay tuned for future serious, seminal samplings.
John Gavazzoni
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John R Gavazzoni
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Thousand Oaks, CA 91360.
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