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Being and Becoming
By John Gavazzoni
What is the relationship between being and becoming? Is it, as seems to be thought conventionally, that all being, all existence, comes to be by becoming to be? I think not. And I think that difference of understanding might be very strategic to the search for truth. "He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him?"
We don't come to a God whose Being is the result of a process of becoming. Of course not! He IS! And from that Being, i.e., the Being, that is without any source other than Itself, expansively becomes more and more of all that He is out of the richness of the depths of all that He is. Neither the Being of God, nor the perfection of that Being is static. All life, victoriously, in the face of the vicious enmity against it is, becomes, and continues to be, "a well of water springing up into eonian life." But let us be clear: Being is first, and then being proceeds to becoming. It is indicative of all being that it IS, and from that indicative of being proceeds the imperative of becoming. The latter needs no help from us for Its self-realization.
Contemplating God ought always to bring us to the church, or better, the ecclesia, the summoned-forth gathering or congregation, and since the ecclesia (transliteration of the Greek, ekklesia), as the body of Christ, according to Paul, is the fullness, or complement, or completion of Him who fills all in all, again, according to Paul, that ecclesia does not merely grow by a growth from God, as Paul is conventionally translated, but rather grows the growth OF God, or it can be translated, increases the increase OF God. Being is not static. The Being in which we all have our being is, Itself, not static, but gloriously expansive. Both of my dear friends, Jonathan Mitchell, and Ed Browne, students of biblical Greek have, independent of each other, dug out that Pauline gem.
Out from within that Being, in which we all have our being, there proceeds a becoming that is the relational dynamic at work in all existence. It is the dynamic within the Godhead, and from "there," as the Source, it energizes, drives forward, and holds together all things. An acorn has within itself a great oak tree, and it becomes the oak tree, in union with the warmth and light of the sun, along with the nutrient-rich watered earth, all of which are integral to its own being. This Reality existed before God created within It the dimension of time, space, and matter.
It came out of Itself (while never leaving Itself), into that dimension and through that dimension back into Itself, and by that process enriching Itself out from within Itself, through Itself, and into Itself. [Check out Jonathan Mitchell's translation of the New Testament, amplified, expanded, and with multiple renderings, available through Amazon for the literal Greek where Paul, conventionally translated, speaks of all things being of God, and through God, and to God.]
Hey, fellow saints, Whatever God chooses to be our experience along the Way, be sure of this: His purpose in it is to enlarge us so that we, both those from this side and the other, together as Christ's body grow the growth of God. We certainly don't cause God's growth, but as gloriously mysterious as it is, it is true that the growth of God and our growth are one in the same.
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