THE SOPORIFIC OF A CHRISTIAN FORMULA
15/11/24 16:49
It’s not difficult to belong to a church and not be aware of the real issues of salvation or even what our salvation includes. Knowing the latter is something that unfolds as we follow Jesus throughout our life journey. But it helps to start in the right place and in Jesus’ words ‘Enter through the Door’. The Door is Jesus and never an ideology. Any door that is the law is a dead end.
DOORS AND DEAD-ENDS
Christ is the Door. The law and religion are not doors but attempts to climb over the wall. There is but one Gospel – that of Jesus and the apostles. Any addition under the guise of ‘new light’ is a form of Gnosticism.’ Gnosticism takes the form of ‘our perspective’ or ‘present truth.’ Its essence is ‘special knowledge’ but knowledge that negates the Gospel of Jesus and the apostles.
THE GOSPEL
Here is a succinct summary of the new covenant gospel of the Kingdom.
“This one movement throughout the Old Testament and New Testament is the movement of God’s grace in which he renews the bond between himself and humanity broken and perverted at the fall, and restores man to communion with himself.
“God does that by giving himself to man in such a way as to assume human nature and existence into oneness with himself. He condescends to enter into our human nature and so elevates it into union with his own divine nature. That is what took place in the incarnation of the Word, in the midst of Israel, in the midst of mankind.” (1)
Legalised renderings of this gospel are a distortion, diversion and a distraction.
COMFORT OF INCLUSION
In Jesus God has covered us in Himself. ‘Spread the corner of your garment over me, since you are a guardian-redeemer of our family’ Ruth 3.9 NIV. This Garment is God in Jesus Christ.
God as trinity is remarkably one with Himself. The enterprise of the trinitarian God has drawn us into this oneness and extended this oneness over us, so that we are one with God, one with ourselves, one with each other and one with the earth. This is why Christ is your life and why Christ is all of life.
(1) Thomas Torrance, The Incarnation, p.45.
