UNIQUE UNIQUENESS
By John Gavazzoni
Each of us as children of God have been favoured with giving unique expression of the Divine Family Nature which we have THROUGH Jesus Christ, our Lord. But the uniqueness of God's only/one-begotten Son sets Him apart as uniquely unique, for only He, in the singularity of His eternal Personhood, is the image of the invisible God. Only in Him, singularly, dwells the fulness of the Godhead bodily. To be sure, as Christ is reproduced in many, those many become "the church which is His body, the fulness of Him who filleth all in all," but as to singularity of individual Personhood, it is only in Jesus Christ, the First-born, that God has chosen that "all fulness should dwell."
All of us, indeed, have been eternally birthed by God, but the Godhead only once DIRECTLY birthed a Son. All the rest of us of whom He is not ashamed to call His brethren--- possessed of the same family nature--- have been birthed by God INDIRECTLY THROUGH that first/single/one-begotten of God in the spiritual union of Christ with His bride, the church, as the Primal reproductive union of the Godhead extends itself as Christ, the body, and Christ, the Bride. When He, THE SON, came out of the womb of God, He had within Him the seeds that would birth the rest of the family of children of God since we were all within that one Seed of the Father that begat the Elder Son.
As the exact image of God, the Eternal Son carries seeds constituted by that one Seed of the Father, so all the children of God owe their generation to that initial divine begetting, as is seen in the archetypical example of the seed of Abraham producing all the generations of the children of Abraham, with Sarah, THROUGH Isaac. I have said it before, and will say it again (and probably again and again) that it is IN THE SON that we all are sons, and it is THE SON in the many sons who makes the sons sons.
You might be thinking that I am describing all the many brethren of Jesus Christ as God's grandchildren. Well, in fact, I am. But let me point out that the word "grandchildren" is a compound noun made compound by an adjective. One's grandchild is not less one's child because his or her childhood is modified as grand. To be a grandchild of God does not make one any less His child. Did you get that? My grandchildren are the children of my daughters and their husbands, but they are still my children by GRAND succession through my daughters and sons-in-law.
I may appear to be merely making a play on words, but the GRANDEUR of THE SON will be seen in the many sons God births through Him. The full disclosure of the Son occurs through the many sons, but there is only one generic sonship, the sonship of the One whose uniqueness is described in that verse of scripture that we love to extol, but rarely give the level of consideration it deserves: "For God thus loved the world that He gave His only/one/single begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have aeonian life." Today, an ancient error is surfacing again. It is the error that affirms that the sonship of Jesus Christ is to be understood as unique only in that He is the best example of sonship, or the most mature of the many sons. Because conventional orthodoxy in the whole has not adequately explained the grandeur of the extension of the sonship of THE Son, a subtle error has rushed in to try to fill that vacuum by the denying the very distinctive uniqueness of our Lord Jesus Christ.
With God, no other input of seeds was involved in the birthing of the Eternal Son of God. Nothing preceded that first conjugal union within God that birthed THE SON. My grandchildren have seed-input preceding that which I gave them in union with my wife.. They have also Wheeler and Vig input, but with God, the purity of the Godhead, without mixture was reproduced in the Son of His/Their love.
I intend that this article shall be, as it were, a warning shot across of the bow of a ship that that is dumping toxic substance into the waters of the present heralding of universal salvation in Jesus Christ. I shall, at every opportunity, as the Spirit leads, oppose this corruption of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Though it may not be the intention of those who are complicite in this perversion, what is being said, and written, has the net effect of explaining away the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
Much very selective and devious borrowing of mere portions of the apostolic teaching as found in scripture---without honestly taking into consideration the whole theological body of the teaching of especially Paul and John--- is abroad today. The result is a form of universalism which denies that it is only "in Him," that we are complete. The accurate truth is that only In Him, our Lord Jesus, is found the totality of all that God has given to all mankind. This distortion of the administration of God removes the passionate relational core of the pleasure of God, and reduces the administration of God to a mere evolutionary process.
Please, dear saints, think soberly of how subtle can be the forms of teaching that deny the Father by denying the Son. When we make of the Son less than He is, we also violate God's Fatherhood. I shall probably devote an entire article to the following consideration: Love has a Way, and if we preach a gospel that holds attempts to magnify the inclusiveness of the love of God, but do so by explaining the operation of God's love in some other way than His way, that "other gospel" will not be "the power of God unto salvation."
The Way of God's love is the Way of giving His only-begotten Son. Are we so dull of spiritual insight as to miss that cardinal truth in "the golden verse of the Bible:" John 3:16, "For God thus loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son....." The love of God is not sent to us any other "way" than this Way, the Way of the Father sending His love in His Son. He, the Son, IS the gift of His love.
UNIQUE UNIQUENESS - Part Two Love's Way
By John Gavazzoni
If we are enabled by God's grace to grasp the full significance of the fourteenth verse of the first chapter of John's gospel, eventually the rest of his treatise concerning the pre-eminence of the Son of God in the administration of God will eventually open to us.
The administration of God---sometimes referred to as the economy or dispensation of God---is the administration of the love of God, freely given in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and personally conveyed by the communion of the Holy Spirit. The Way God loved us was to send His love in the Person of His Son. Jesus is God's Way of bringing all men to Himself. We come to the Father by Jesus bringing us. Jesus is God's Way, God's Truth, and the very Life of God in the flesh (Jn. 14:6).
Jesus is God's unerring Way, His never failing love-Way. There is no other way. There are some who believe that it is intellectually superior to think of God as respecting every and any way a man or woman might invent to come to God, as if Jesus had said, "Take your pick of ways to get to the Father, and I'll be fully supportive of you whatever way you choose."
That cannot be, of course, since we can only make contact with God in a Way consistent with His nature. What is the relationship of God's nature and God's Way? I have often spoken and written of God as Pure Relational Being. God is love, and love is relational, relational in a family Way. From eternity, the singular delight of the Godhead was to have a family, a family that proceeded forth from that Being in whom we all have our being as the Family-constituted Personhood by which the Divine Nature fulfills Itself. In giving birth to a Son, the full potential of the Godhead was relationally fulfilled, given the whole family that was in, and would proceed through Him.
Suffer me to repeat: The first step toward having that Family was to give birth to a Son who is the delight of God's Father/Mother nature, a First-born Son in and by whom the Divine Nature would fulfill itself as Family. The Son of God is exactly central to the Being of God being what It is, a Family with the Son as the Beginning and End, the First and the Last, the Alpha and Omega of the emergence of Family-constituted Personhood out from the Parental potential of the Divine Nature.
The whole Family started with Him, THE First-born Son, and however we might conceive of the conclusion of that Family, His Sonship will bring the Family to its conclusion/goal/end. So how could there be any other way? The Family-passion of God is the dynamic of His Way, and that passion will draw us to Himself. There cannot be any other way.
God is very exclusive in order that His inclusiveness might reach its full glory. He permits us no lesser destiny than Family inclusion, that Family that will fully enjoy and display the glory of His love. That family will be nothing less than the whole family of humanity. The Lord says to us, "Come to me, and meet with me at the point of my delight, my Son, the Word made flesh, whose body you are."