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Union and Total Solidarity with Christ
By John R. Gavazzoni
There will inevitably come questions regarding maintaining the theological balance between our total union with Christ/His total solidarity with our/all humanity - without losing the distinction between Himself and us. Complete union with distinction. We, distinct from Him, are complete in Him. He, as our Source in that union.
It is such a rich subject: while Paul explained Christ to be a many-membered body: "as the body has many members, and the many members being one body, so also IS Christ," yet He makes the distinction between the Head and the body. I think all the right inferences are to be drawn from that ancient confession, Jesus is Lord, and that there is One Lord over all.
Jesus: "I AND the Father are One." Perfect Oneness with distinction, with Jesus further explaining that distinction: "the Father has life in Himself, and gives the Son to have life in Himself." So many brethren go off half-cocked, teaching stuff that blurs that distinction.
Something like, we must suffer from being afflicted by all that we are not in order to become all that we are. In the end, we can only become what we are.... there's no such thing as becoming what we are not.... even while all that is contrary to what/who we are demands our submissive acceptance. The opposition of that contrariety, in the end, only serves to bring forth "the liberty of the glory of the children of God" in all its radiance/effulgence.
God summed up this whole process in Jesus, in Whom we all are complete. Jonathan's translation reveals this as a journey: the divine Godyssey: God, in Christ, taking us all with Him from life through death to life super-glorious by resurrection. In the experience of resurrection from death, dare we say, by that experience, the eonian-life sufferings inherent in the limitations of finitude squeezed/squeezes out the full depths of the inherently boundless infinitude of Zoe-life.
That experience Paul described as the Spirit searching out the things of God, yea, the deep things of God. Imagine that: God searching out Himself. This journey was the journey of the Son of God as the Son of Man = Son of Adam. The Seed of Christ was within Adam, as the Son of God whose flesh/humanity veiled His Deity even to Himself, until, in the fulness of time, God sent forth His Son forth from out of the midst of that humanity, born of a woman in whom was the Seed traced back to the Seed of the woman back in Genesis.
That's at the heart of the mystery of godliness, God, manifest in the flesh. In that Man, Deity was no longer veiled by the flesh, but manifest in the flesh: in Him, all the fulness of Deity dwelt BODILY unveiled. He was/is the summation of Deity and Humanity so that as both, He is making all things/the whole new. This, I dare say, involves a new experience for Deity.
This eonian-journey is God's journey taking us along. The journey starts above all the heavens, descends into the depths of hades. There, in hades the last, full, final suffering of death occurs, i.e., Christ, inclusive of all humanity in Himself, suffers the essence of death's ultimate delusion: the delusion of abandonment by God, and returns to above all the heavens having profited by a gain of glory out from within glory's own depths: From glory to glory.
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