A Bold Theological Confrontation
By John Gavazzoni

Introduction: In response to the well-considered suggestion that I reduce the thoughts contained in our article "Evil's Primal Origin" into a simpler statement so that the young people in a certain pastor’s church might find it more understandable, I sent off the following to him toward that end. I've attached his note to me at the bottom of this article.

On the way to true spiritual maturity, a maturity rich in the spirit of wisdom and revelation, it's unavoidable that we must face the truth that the purpose and plan of God for mankind included the necessity of the entrance of sin and death into the world. Yes, I meant what I just wrote; the purpose and plan of God REQUIRED the entrance of sin and death into the world.

If we think of that negative intrusion simply being a problem for God, we immediately reduce His sovereignty to make it fit our revelation-starved concepts of what ought to be ethical behavior on the part of Him who works all things after the counsel of His own will. The intrusion of sin and death into the world, before considering their problematic element, must be seen as first being instrumental, FOR "except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone......."

That sublime statement by Jesus clearly indicates that sin and death, rather than merely being a condition requiring fixing, were given a place in God's plan, and that by none other than Himself, with an increase of His glory in view.

For the increase to occur that Jesus was referring to, we, in union with God in Christ, had to go through the experience of being subjected to all that we ARE NOT, in order that we, together with Him, might from the depths of our Being in Him, become all that WE ARE. To repeat, IN ORDER THAT WE MIGHT BECOME ALL THAT WE ARE, IT IS NECESSARY THAT WE BE SUBJECTED TO ALL THAT WE ARE NOT as we proceed from glory to glory. This truth is grounded in fact that the Being of God, including His perfection, is not static, but eternally unfolding out of depths of the Divine Nature.

It is the nature of God, the God who IS love, to share His glory with all His creation specifically through the agency of the Person of His Son, that Son who is both the bodily fullness of the Godhead, and the summation of all true Humanness as the Second Man, the Last Adam, the Seed of God's One New Man.

Serious students of scripture, having the dumbing-down filter of pseudo-orthodoxy removed from the eyes of their hearts, will shortly find that this truth runs through the Bible from beginning to end offering a fresh perspective on the fullest and deepest meaning of the death, burial, resurrection, ascension, enthronement and glorification of Jesus Christ our Lord, and the Lord of all.

In closing I offer another statement of the Lord Jesus as representative of what I’ve tried to make clear. In our Lord's dealing with the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well, He described the essential nature of being brought to the faith of Christ. He described it as Himself giving her water, which would become in her, a well of water, springing up into life-eonian (life, out from eternity, into the ages, pertaining to the ages, and enduring through the ages until its purpose is fulfilled).

Since our contemporary Christianity is really more self-centered than Christ-centered, we fail to recognize that the experience that Jesus described is rooted in the operation of the nature of God, so that when we experience the life of Christ, we become partakers of the Divine Nature, and the operation of that Nature. That is, God is eternally, out of the depths of His Being, non-statically, like a well of water always springing up, drawing forth from Himself more and more of all that He is.

This leads us to a deeper understanding of the operation of the grace of God, which most truly defined is simply the givingness of God in Christ, and the adversarial presence of sin and death in the human condition serves to intensify the operation of that grace, "for where sin abounds, grace doth much more abound."

The intensity of the passion of God's love for all humanity increases in its expression as it is faced with the alienation and enmity that has infected man since Adam. The passion of God's love could never be fully expressed and experienced by men without the necessity of God subjecting Himself to the infamy of the crucifixion of His Son, as "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, NOT reckoning their sins against them."

That is, as Harry Robert Fox has said, "When man did his worst to God, God did His best for man." In that sin which gathers together all sins into one act---that of God delivering up His Son into the hands of evil men----it was shown that the love of God is so pure that there is no element at all of retaliatory vengeance. There is only: "Father forgive them, for they no not what they do."

“I believe I am basically in agreement with what you have said here, but perhaps you might want to put this in plain simple terms that us "regular folk" might understand?... I pastor a church that is made up of about 1/3 young people (teens and college age), and for spiritual truth to be relevant it must be in terms that are somewhat easily understood.

I might sum it up like this- "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things." (Isaiah 45:7)”