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The Loss of Personhood
By John Gavazzoni
"...but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day THOU eatest thereof, dying, THOU shalt die." (Emphasis mine).
Death is the destruction of one's personhood. It isn't someTHING in us that dies, it's the person that dies. Death is the perishing of personhood----to put it in a way that might stick in your mind.
Evil de-personalizes, de-humanizes us. Deity becomes all that It is, and affirms and identifies Itself as Divine Personhood. "I AM that I AM/I WILL BECOME what I WILL BECOME." We believers drift away from the Truth as we're lured into philosophy that values knowledge above the personalization of being. "....in HIM (personal pronoun), WE live and move, and have OUR being." (emphasis and explanation mine). We drift from this when we succumb to the lust of knowing someTHING, rather than knowing someONE. The result---since we innately crave to be real people---is the erection of a persona without eternal substance.
To have no sense of personal identity apart from union with HIM, who is Reality of True Personhood, IS eonian life. Many THINGS ABOUT Christ have excited me over the years, but such excitement has always lead to disappointment, but encounters with Him have always been fulfilling. He, Himself, is our expectation, and God will be faithful to strip us of every other vainly competing hope.
Now here is the strange paradox in this regard: When you read, for instance, the epistles of the New Testament, and read them with your mind energized by the same Breath of inspiration by which they were written, and thereby meet in spirit the person who wrote each of them, what you meet are men who identify themselves, not essentially as revelation imparters, but slaves of Jesus Christ.
It's quite clear, particularly but not exclusively at all, with Paul. He wants the reader to know up front, that he is the slave-envoy of Jesus Christ, and he has "found his identity" in that relationship. Whew! In this day when the issue of finding our identity in Him is in our religious atmosphere, we need to ponder that constantly reoccurring apostolic testimony.
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