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All in All
By John R. Gavazzoni
It will only take the reader just a bit into this article to realize....if he or she is familiar with my writings....that I'm returning again, as I have a number of times to confronting what I call a spirt of elitism that the Christian pietistic community (in its many forms) is particularly vulnerable to. This time I will set that predisposition against the backdrop of God's determination to become All in all. J. Preston Eby has very fundamentally described the relationship of the All to the all: "God, who was All, created another all, so that He might be All in all." That's a priceless gem of insight.
The first All is God as Spirit, including all those He has timelessly given birth to out from the Spirit which He is, with His only-begotten Son at the center. The second all is the dimension of materiality, the space-time continuum, the dimension of the ages which the Book of Hebrews tells us He formed. Note: since He was All before creating the other all, the only construction material available was His own Spirit substance. (A tree, formed out of the substance of God-stuff, does not by its formation become God.) The Spirit of God is simply the tree's source. God can make of His limitless Spirit a tree without making that tree a deity. A careful reader will understand that I'm not teaching anything related to pantheism.
The above is an important distinction, and there are distinctions within that distinction. What God births by His Spirit is one thing; while what He creates from out of His Spirit is another thing. Begetting and creating are not to be confused with one another. The former becomes a member of the Family of God, the Family which is God; the latter amount, as best I can describe, to material reflections of their Divine Source. Creating out of His Spirt-substance does not mean that God has conferred Deity upon what He has materially formed.
The distinction was explained to me by the Spirit of Truth in this way: "you are the fruit of my loins and the work of my hands." It is, more precisely, God's Spirit-substance in His Sons by which all creation was formed, which explains why all creation is longing for the manifestation of the Sons of God: longing to behold the liberty of the glory of the children of God, for its deliverance from its bondage to decay. In a word: as the sons go, so goes all creation.
So, here's my thesis: it's All in all, not All in some. Only all of the second all can contain the All of the first All. It's all or nothing, brethren. No part of the second all will reach the absolute perfection of having for its all the All of, and which is, God. There is no other adequate vessel. The glory of the All is for the entirety of the all, for, "the knowledge of the glory of the Lord shall fill all the earth (all earthenness) as the waters cover the sea." There is, indeed, a first-fruit experience of that final, full, unfolded fruitage, but as representative of what must be the experience of the whole.
Dear saint who, since Jesus first called you to Himself, has had the things of God, the things of the Spirit of God as your first concern; who has thought of yourself as, more than anything else, intent on pursuing, "the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, (your) Lord;" of aiming at "the mark of the prize of the high-calling of God in Christ Jesus;" you and I of whom I referred to above as the pietistic community, how about this for cultivating needful humility: apart from the likes of the man in Chicago's Skid Row sucking on a bottle of Muscatel being perfected, there will be no perfection for you and me. Yeah, I stand by that.
God is the All for the all, and for nothing less. "Enlarge the place of thy [heart's] tent, and let them stretch forth curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes, for thou shalt break forth....." The mark of anyone enjoying some measure of the manifestation (uncovering, unveiling, disclosure) of his/her sonship, is that they glory in the expectation of the manifestation of the all becoming constituted by the All, with none left behind. The mature are not self-absorbed with their maturity. Maturing in sonship requires a care for babes with the vision toward seeing them as equally with you, "heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ."
There is a principle of mutual dependency within the kingdom of God. For instance, of the Old Testament saints, the writer of Hebrews wrote that, "they, without us cannot be made perfect." Likewise, strange as it may seem, not only are the less mature dependent upon help from the more mature, but it's also true in reverse. Nothing challenges growing into maturity more than being inseparably united on the Way with babes in Christ. The less mature do serve the growth of the more mature. My wife and I, I dare say, enjoyed very little maturity until our kids came along. It could be said that, we, without them, would have remained more or less quite self-absorbed going forward.
Of course, I'm not implying that maturity is impossible without having children. No, but God will certainly supply some equivalent challenge toward that end. Just recently, on a Christian Facebook forum I participate in, there was a post about being an overcomer, about being among the 144,000 in the Book of Revelation. I found the post both sad and amusing. I confess: been there, done that. By been there, done that, I mean I remember how I came to see myself...quite distinct from poor, ordinary brethren...as one whom the movement I was involve with at the time referred to as a "seeking one."
We were made to believe that since we were responsive to the movement's apostle and his message, it meant that we had the distinction within the larger believing community of being seeking ones compared to all the rest who seemed not to be driven by the same level of zeal and devotion as we, the more sensitive spiritual-elite. We are called to excel in the things of God, but certainly not in competition with others, but for the sake of others. I'm sure that while Paul wrote of his consternation regarding those brethren who seemed to be stuck in spiritual babyhood, that if we were to press the apostle about what's really the issue, he would admit that each of us, at any given moment, is exactly where God has us, and that, well within His plan. In the end, we all run the race and fight the good fight of faith together.
The Greek text is clear that we are together crucified and risen with Christ: together. And it will be together, and only together, that we shall all...the presently believing, and the not-yet believing....arrive at the goal of being conformed to the image of God's Son. We are inseparably joined on the Way.
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