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The Experience of Reality
By John R. Gavazzoni
Within the Eternality of God...the Eternality which is God....within the Timelessness of, and which is, God, Reality and its experience are always concurrent. In the dimension of God, and which is God, there exists no even momentary distinction and certainly no contradiction between what is real and what is experienced. But this article will deal with Reality within the dimension of the ages which God formed within Himself, yet containing in that dimension, a contrarian working at odds with the Reality that completely circumscribes it.
While this dimension of a contrarian bent exists within the confines of God, it is not "in" Him as part of His nature. In a vision the Lord gave to me, I saw that dimension indissolubly contained, as in an indissoluble capsule. Nothing can leak out of it into the Divine Nature, but God can, does, and has invaded that "strange land," in the Person of His incarnate Son, and continues to do so by "the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all." Here, Reality and experience, while they can and do converge, for the most part, they are at odds with one another: "The flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, and the two are contrary to one another."
Where life regenerated by the resurrection of Christ is at work in a life, we hear, we see, we are touched by Reality in all its immutability, in all its incorruptibility, and we are changed. We are changed by the invasion of Reality into, and against any and all complicity of, our flesh with this present, evil, dominant system (Greek: kosmos.) This is an action out from within the spiritual man into the soilical man. The Kingdom of God, indeed, is within us. There is a core-quality of Reality by which It must become experiential in the ages. Within the ages, Reality is destined to become experience. The Truth, as the saying goes, will out.
The Truth/Reality which is Christ, reigns within and above all human experience. Our experience cannot but bow "in due time" to Reality's reign which is ours in Christ Jesus, i.e., we are predestined to be conformed to His image.... He who is the same yesterday, today, and into the ages, brought in Himself, the unchangeableness of the dimension of His Father. Into the ages He remains all, and only what, He is within the eternality of, and which is, God. This is "the rest that remains to the people of God." All self-striving to be rid of the contrariety of our flesh is vain, for it, by its striving, rejects the inevitability of Reality becoming experience. For those of you philosophically-inclined, it's existentialism of the God kind.
Jonathan Mitchell's discovery of the root meaning of the Greek, conventionally translated as "commandment" in most English translations of the New Testament, speaks directly to this truth. I found it particularly clarifying in John's first epistle where "commandment," as usually understood, always seemed out of sync with the context of the whole epistle. Our brother, Jonathan, investigating the root meaning of "commandment," found that it primarily has the sense of "the imparted or implanted goal." The Seed of our eonian destiny, Christ, has been implanted in us, so that we must become what we are in Him out from within that dimension of the eternality of, and which is, God....out from within the Womb from which we came.
The Reality which is Christ, has within It the imperative of unfolding into experience. It's the Seed Whose innate power of full fruition overcomes all that would seek Its destruction. According to an immutable principle, we can only, and must, become all that we are in the face of having been plunged into all that we are not.
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