From Being to Creaturehood

From Being to Creaturehood
By John Gavazzoni

"For in Him, we live and move and have our being." When Paul affirmed this remarkable summary of the root of human existence, describing and identifying the constitution of all humanity, of what it truly means to be human, he did so as one seated with Christ at the right hand of God, as one having the advantage of that viewpoint, but yet acknowledging that we all, while having our being within God's Being, also live in this world as creatures of God-thankfully, not abandoned by God in that dimension, but having Him with us, our Emmanuel (God with us).

What is the relationship between our creaturehood, and God's all-inclusive Being? How can we have our being within eternal Being-for certainly His Being is eternal-and yet our existence also include having been crafted within time by the hand of God? ("And the Lord God FORMED man of the soil of the ground.")

Jesus spoke of two births to the inquiring Nicodemus: "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit." What is the relationship between these two births? Paul understood the relationship quite differently than present-day evangelical orthodoxy, which insists that the relationship is one of utter separateness, which foundationally poor assumption is traceable to the mistaken doctrine of creation out of nothing. (Creation "Ex Nihilo")

Paul saw, from the heavenly viewpoint, that our God-constituted being, our Being- constituted being, in the present time, lies hidden within our encraftedness. He explained very carefully, as recorded in 1Cor. 15, that the spiritual is within the natural, to be revealed and enriched by the process of death and resurrection. While our eternal sonship, from within, and out from the eternal Son, is the Source of our creaturehood, presently that sonship lies, for the most part, concealed within our encrafted, eonian-adapted existence.

We all have been born of the Spirit, and born of the flesh. Since our creaturehood was crafted, not out of nothing, but out of the stuff of, out of the spirit-substance of our God-birthed being, our creaturehood includes the birthing capacity inherent in our Spirit birthing. Out from Adam's singular creaturehood has come the whole human race by us all being born of the flesh, but that flesh was crafted out of "that which is born of the Spirit," and exhibits that characteristic of existing as birthing beings, according to the likeness of Him in Whom we have our being.

The spirit of man, or the spirit which is man, came not from the encrafting hand of God, but by the child-bearing, child-birthing of God as Spirit. From that Origin we we're formed within space and time, within the eons. But within our encraftedness lies our indestructible spirit, that which we have, that which we are in the Being of God, the Being which is God.

There is much clumsiness, much adolescent understanding once again appearing on the theological scene, re: the essence of our being. A discernment of spirits, easily picks up on the devaluing of earthen humanness within the postulation that "we need to understand that we are spirit," as if being spirit and being flesh are utterly contradistinctive, while the latter is held by many to be simply a religious illusion.

Spirit that does not become flesh-if there could be such a thing-would be stunted S(s)pirit. PLEASE think the incarnation. PLEASE understand that God manifested in the flesh in/as Jesus Christ, the all-inclusive true Human, constitutes the full out-forming of, the full flowering of Deity. When "the Word became flesh," did the Word do so consistent with the nature of Deity? God forbid that you should be so stupid as to think not.

To be sure, in the incarnation, God shared with us the vulnerability to the contrarianism that is inherent in our creaturely existence. Understand: God is bodily out-formed within eternity, and then out from eternity into time. The Seed of Deity is fulfilled by the eternal flowering of Itself in embodiment. There is no such thing as non-embodied S(s)pirit. In that transition from eternity into time, Deity-the Being in Whom we have our being-suffers from the anomaly of Eternal Being submitting Itself, with us included, to material existence. To quote J. Preston Eby: "God projected Himself out of Himself, that He might be Himself in another dimension, and He did this by His Word." End of quote.

Of course, in that projection, the eternality of God was not lost, but it was put under nature-violating stress. While time is found within eternity, it is a dimension that involves a certain strangeness factor. We are here and now, strangers and pilgrims in an alien land. Strange, not as the Gnostics would have it, as the material world being essentially evil, but strange because it is in fact not essentially evil, but essentially good.

It's our essential God-likeness that finds the pressure of space-time confinement strange, and in that strangeness, our outer man suffers corruptibility and mortality, but the inner man holds firm to H(h)is incorruptibility and immortality. The suffering of incorruptibility and immortality by the experience of corruption and death, draws forth out of incorruption and immortality-out of the depths of the Divine Nature, an enrichment of Itself out of Itself.

That's why we dare not remove the centrality of God's experience, and ours in Him, as realized within the Christ event. Some will find my following statement troubling: Both FOR God, and FOR man, the death of Christ, according to the pre-determinative counsel of God, was an absolute necessity. Oh how repulsive some folks. who fancy themselves to be on the cutting-edge of revelation, find that declaration to be.

Their delusion cries out, "No, no, it did not have to be; it could have been otherwise. The death of Christ might have been avoided if we could only have maintained our Christ-consciousness. WE got it wrong the first time around, and God had nothing to do with us getting it wrong, but now WE'RE seeing things clearly, and WE'RE going to get it right this time around."

Then there's that other variation of the above, which has it that Adam never awoke from the sleep God put him into, and all this eonian nastiness has only been a bad dream. Listen Dumdums, you're playing around the slippery slope of becoming enemies of the cross of Christ.

I look back on the several occasions, when after ministering at a conference, church or small home gathering, someone would rush up to me breathlessly, and draw me aside to help me get beyond my crude understanding of what God has accomplished and been up to in Christ. They nearly always exude a certain amusement at my placing the death and resurrection of Christ, as central to the administration of God. Their faces usually had a certain artificial glow of revelation superiority. I'm afraid that the next time this happens, my response might be, "quick, run and bring that wastebasket over to me, so I don't throw up all over the floor."

Part Two - All-Inclusive Personhood

This second installment of our series will be unabashedly theological since, as I have asserted many times, we all, to some degree, form theological conclusions-even often following a genuine experience of revelation-from within a theological model rife with elements of "the tradition of men," and so our revelation becomes molded into the shape of the model within which we received light.

I will be postulating a fresh model as a frame of reference for considering the relationship between the Being within which we all have our being, and the all of creation from above which, yet within which, God is resolutely committed to becoming all-He being THE All of creation's yearning.

There are, I hope you understand, two "alls" in the administration of God, the All that God is, and the all that God created out from Himself, in order to draw forth out of Himself the superabundance of His Allness, in order to become All in that other all. Strange as it may seem to the mind confined within pseudo-orthodoxy, God Himself, made Himself needy in solidarity with His creation, so that there might be a complementary partner for the infinite of provision which He is. As I've noted before, our profound neediness, is the perfect complement for God's superabundant supply.

All this wondrous economy, this wondrous administration and dispensation is found within, and unfolds within Personhood: One singular Personhood, that of the Son of God. All creation has its beginning within, exists within, continues on within, and has/will realize its destiny within Him and further and further into Him. Within HIM, not within some depersonalized cosmic ideal, for the fulness of the Being within which we have our being, is fully emobodied within that Son-Personhood, which is at the same time, singular and corporate, the corporate proceeding forth from within that singularity of Personhood, which alone, exclusively, is the delight of God.

Before ever the angel announced "Behold, unto you this day is born in the City of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord," hear the shout of Deity in the eternal Day, "We have a Son, We have a Son, We are fulfilled, and by Him, all will be filled full." Watcham Nee delivered a message which was transcribed to become a book titled "Christ the Sum of all Spiritual Things," wonderfully heralding the preeminence of Christ our Lord. Indeed brother Nee, but I dare add that He is the Sum of all-PERIOD. No need to limit Him to being the summation of all spiritual things.

He is the summation of Deity, of the Divine Nature, and all that has ever proceeded forth from God has been integrally included in the procession of the fulness of Deity in the eternal birthing of the Son of God. Deity Itself found fulfillment as It became both Parental and Filial out from Its congugal Nature. Deity can from that eternal Moment say, and rejoices to say, "I AM THAT I AM-Father, Mother and Son. We are Family." From that nuclear Family which is God, has come forth the whole family of God, which family we are.

Part Three - God Does Not Create Spirits

It's becoming clearer and clearer to me why several years ago, the Lord spoke to me with great emphasis, saying, "You are the fruit of my loins, and the work of my hands." Joining together psychology's recognition of a level of mental impression that operates below our conscious mind's radar screen-psychology calls it the subconscious, or unconscious mind-with the Spirit's way of teaching us all things, I realize now, that certain scriptures had been impressed upon my thinking at that level described above, beneath my awareness, to lay there until a later time when He, the Spirit of Truth would raise it up to become understanding.

Two of those scriptures re: the subject of the origin of spirits, were: "That which is born of the Spirit is spirit....." and ".... the Father of spirits." It was, among other things, the impress of those scriptures that finally lead to the Lord speaking to me in a tone that, without using the actual words, conveyed a truly, truly, I say to you weightiness, "you are the fruit of my loins, and the work of my hands." In that due time, it became very clear to me: Spirit births spirt, and God is not the CREATOR of spirits, He's the FATHER of spirits.

There is some teaching abroad that, in the attempt to provide a theological model within which to appreciate the purity of the God/Christ-origin of human existence, and to reconcile the two scenarios of creation in the early chapters of Genesis, the first being the record of Deity by Their agreeing counsel to create man according to Their likeness, and proceeding to do so, and the second record of God forming man of the soil of the ground." As the saying goes, "the devil's in the details."

It is theorized by some that the first scenario is one of God CREATING man as a spirit, after which his physical dimension was added to him. The theory, as I understand what is being proposed, is meant to elevate in our understanding the spirit-constitution of our origin so that we will no longer think of ourselves as MERE physical beings.

Please consider that wonderful thread that runs all through the Bible of the very positive portrayal of the body in the purpose of God. In our teaching, are we playing in the same key as God is in respect to how God thinks of embodiment.

The above, actually ancient, but once-again, warmed-over, emerging theory, in a very subtle way, weakens the way God desires us to know Him. Nothing is more precious to God, than we, like our Lord Jesus, should know Him as our Father, our unconditionally loving Father, gracious beyond our ability to express in the operation of that love,, and personally communing with us in that profound intimacy that His love so passionately seeks.

You see, a father doesn't create children. A father births children. The difference between the above clumsy theory and the truth of the full implications of God's Fatherhood, is the kind of difference that is discerned when we "rightly cut the Word of Truth, " and we "Study to show ourselves approved unto God as workman that need not be ashamed."

I addressed this difference once before in the article on our web page titled, "Sonship Pinocchio-style." I hope my readers will take the time to give that short article serious consideration. The origin of our being, and our personhood, within the eternality of God, came from the potentiality within Deity to become Parental and Filial; and as an aside, factor into your thinking the truth that it is theologically inconceivable that Divine Potentiality might never be fully realized.

It is Divine Love's Impulse to send forth Its fully masculine essence as Seed/Sperm (Greek: Sperma), to seek out Its fully feminine, receptive complement, and by the union of those complementary fulnesses, to start Their Family in the birthing of the One in whom dwells all the fulness of Deity. This is NOT creation, this is birthing. The fact that all creatures reproduce after their kind, traces to the truth that God births after Their kind, and the multiplication of creatures after their kind bears witness to a birthing origin.

We were not made to BE by an act of creation, but from that birthing which is by means of the conjugal commUNION within the Divine Nature. Ontological reproduction can only occur by impregnation, conception and birth. (Without that, the creature would be a sort of wooden dummy). From the spirit-substance of the fruit of that Love-union, God created the soil from which He formed us in Adam. With Christ, we surrendered a peripheral measure of our S(s)on-substance, as material for our creaturehood.

Please ponder: Our present eonian, bodily state came about by our eternal sonship, as the corporate extension of the Only-begotten of the Father, being translated, transferred, into eonian materiality within the space-time continuum.

We are truly the children of God, not mere creations. We are the fruit of His loins and the work of His hands. And please also ponder: Our eternal being, out from within God's Being, is an embodied being. As I've written before, there is no such thing as bodyless spirit. We've had bodies from the Beginning, for the Source of our Being, embodies Itself by putting on Its inner essence of glory. Our present bodies originate from that eternal embodiment, which is presently subjected to futility, but that subjugation cannot intrinsically alter our glory-origin. From the inside out, your bodily being was formed out of glory-soil, presently walking about incognito.

This explains the relationship between the account of God conferring within, and agreeing to create man, then proceeding to do so, and the account of man being formed of the soil of the ground. The "man" referred to in, "Let Us make man in our image, and according to our likeness" already had his being in the Being of God. He was made out of something, and that something was the material of his spirit sonship. He had being, within, and out from, the depths of Deity BEFORE what is conveyed by both those accounts. Within eternal Deity lay our very humanness in union with the True Man, waiting to be birthed, in order that Deity might fulfill Itself as Family.

Our being existed before our creaturehood, and when we resort to the word "before," which is conventionally understood as previous on linear time-line, we do so as a concession to our present time-oriented thinking. But theologically, "before" indicates that upon which all things are founded, as in "He is before all things, and in Him all things are held together."

Consider that the Ark of the Covenant, a symbol of where we meet with, and commune with God, safe and secure upon the mercy seat, was made of wood (a symbol of humanity) overlaid with gold (a symbol of Deity).

So it should lead us to understand that WITHIN Deity lies Humanness-the wood within the gold-so that the incarnation was not a desperate Plan B by God to try to rescue what little He could in the face of Eve's disastrous seduction, a desperate Plan B to cut His losses as much as possible. Oh, sing it over and over again to me, wonderful words of life: the incarnation was God being God in the eon, as He is in eternity.

Our birthed origin, is not to be understood on a linear time-line, but within the eternality of God, as the extension of the Son who IS eternally begotten. Within time, to repeat, we use the word "before" in a linear sense, but when using that word to trace our God-origin, we use it in the sense of that upon which all is founded, and from which all being proceeds. We are speaking as best we can of eternal things, from the filtering viewpoint of time. It is in that latter sense that Paul writes that "He is before all things...."

"Beloved, now are we the CHILDREN of God...." Get it saints, God don't CREATE children (pardon my resorting to bad grammar to make the point again). He/They first BIRTHED/BIRTHS us as His kin, and then MADE/MAKES us into eonian creatures. I must end on this note: In doing so, He foresaw the ecstasy and agony that would be involved in having kids, and He will see us through the agony that we share with Him, until we come into the liberty of the glory of our sonship.

Addendum:

If some of my readers are thinking, "just wait a minute John, didn't God create angels, as spirit beings?" Well, in fact, there is no biblical record at all of a creation of a separate order of, a separate species of pure spirit beings. The Bible does refer many, many times to agents/messengers, as the Greek has it.

Translators, following tradition, chose to translate the Greek, "aggelos" as "angels," but the word simply means agent or messenger, and with their place within the administration of God, if they were a separate order of spirit beings, you would expect some reference to as such, but there is no such reference. There are many references to them, but not a distinct created species of being. I don't know if I should refer to that translator's choice, as Anglo-sizing "aggelos" as "angels," or call it a transliteration, but the choice was according to the tradition of men very evidently.

In the beginning of the Book of Hebrews, as the writer sets out to present the superiority of Jesus over all the elements of the Old Covenant, a superiority fundamentally that of being the Reality of all those shadows and types, he begins with comparing God speaking to us in many and different ways by the prophets with Him speaking now "in a Son."

Having declared that, the writer goes on to say in the immediate context, that the Son is better than the "aggelos," the agent/messengers. See the connection? In this case, the "aggelos," are the prophets, clearly human agents, not "angels," as a separate spirit species. This is clearly evident in the context. The writer does not suddenly take off in another direction pertaining to comparing the Son with a separate species of spirit beings.

God always chooses human vessels, human agents to declare His Word, to bring succor, comfort and strength to His people. "God sent forth His Son born of a woman....." and He sends us forth as multiplications of Himself, the Logo of God. God's agent-messengers may come to us in spirit from the other side, or from right here as still present brethren, but they are our brethren-men, humans.

When the same writer extols the superiority of man, as though for a time made a little lower than the prophet-agents-messengers, but crowned with glory and honor, the comparison refers to the superiority of our Personhood over our agency as such.

Those prophets "in times past" were, in that penultimate dispensation, just messenger-agents, their sonship at that time was concealed, but we, and they, by ultimate identification in the new covenant, are manifestly sons, with a commission, but our commission does not define us, our sonship does. God intimately knows me, and communes with me as a son, not as an mere messenger.

That's a truth that I need to penetrate to the very core of my heart, so that an identity as a preacher does not displace my identity as a son of God. The heathen are our inheritance as sons in union with the Son, not as mere messenger-agents. Finally understood, we, in union with Christ, are God's message AS sons. ALWAYS measure a theological assumption by the value it places upon Humanness.

John's Index

Greater Emmanuel

Email John