THE UN-SHRUNK GOSPEL OF JESUS AND THE APOSTLES
13/11/24 15:16
The Gospel of Jesus is a Gospel that reveals our union with God. It reveals it because it has been achieved already and it reveals it because this is the real, the one and only Gospel. There is no other. This is the Gospel that is our life. It’s the apostle’s teaching and the Gospel of the Kingdom. Paul calls additions to this Gospel, dung.
That there is one gospel is why any gospel founded on the law is a non-gospel, a lie and a perversion that maintains people in the illusion of separation of the fall when in fact they are one with God.
MIND OF CHRIST IS HIS GOSPEL
Our mindset is the reality in which we live – which is why we must seek to live in the truth of Christ’s gospel rather than some dung gospel of the kind Paul mentions when he says, ‘Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ’ Phil 3.8 KJV.
‘The bond of fellowship between God and man is broken by rebellion and sin. It belongs to the nature of sin to divide, to create disorder, to disrupt, to destroy fellowship.’ Jesus is our joining to God. We are joined to the Rock from which we are hewn in Jesus.
SEPARATION UNDONE
Our status with God before the cross is the separation undone by Adam. We are not joined to God by the law but in fact remain in separation. In our minds in a law-mindset. The law condemns and joins no one to God. Only God joins us to God – which has been achieved in Jesus Christ who came in the flesh among us and now lives by the Spirit in us. Jesus is our union with God.* This is how we are declared righteous and it’s how we become righteous. Through Christ our life. The bottom line is Christ is us.
INCARNATION
‘Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist’ 2 John 1.7 NIV. This is why the misguided notion of the law come in our flesh is of the flesh and a deception. According to Paul, grace is Christ who is our life.
*This is difficult to understand without our living in the category of life in the Spirit. In this mode we are contained in an information mindset that is a product of the knowledge of good and evil and its ‘letter that kills’ epistemology.