WHAT BEGAN WITH A BANG HAS NO ROOT

The ‘I am of God’ means that God is everywhere and was present before the incarnation of the Son of God as Jesus of Nazareth. God was present in the world before He made a friend of Abraham and was present with Israel before God with us appeared in the person of Jesus Christ. God was with other folks too, who pursued wisdom and truth with serious intent. The three wise men were not Jews, yet they were used by God to endorse and announce the birth of the Christ - God with us.

Judaism leads to Christ. But Christ does not lead to Judaism and its rites and usages.

LIFE DEMONSTRATED
New life flows personally from Jesus Christ. Jesus taught the Kingdom during His life and illustrated the Kingdom by healing folks and raising them from the dead. He revealed our Father in His person and declared Himself to be the light and life of mankind. In being Himself on mission from His Father He revealed us to ourselves. Jesus is the real Mirror. Not the law. Jesus is transformed life. Not moralism.

WHO IS YOUR LIFE
This is why Paul writes, ‘Christ who is your life’ and not the law that is our life. In practise, law can be the ten commandments or the moralism that many confuse with the Kingdom Jesus began. Legalism can also be a culture of religion and more broadly a version of the knowledge of good and evil promoted as a substitute for Kingdom Life.

NOT CONTRIVED
Much ‘church growth’ depends on ‘the letter’. Kingdom Growth happens as a result of Christ’s spirit and life as us.  In oneness with Christ, you will not need to think a lot about missiology because you will be alive with spirit and life and life will be you. This spirit of life will touch the other person and they will enquire as to the life that is in you. In religion we do not have this life and it’s obvious to the non-believer that we are no more alive than they are.

WOOD HEAP RELIGION
Jesus told Nicodemus that to enter His Kingdom of life and union with God, he must be born again. For us this means being born from religion into oneness with God in Christ. For the Jew it meant being born from the law into the Spirit. For humanity it means being born out of Adam into Jesus Christ and infinite life. For the politically correct it means being born from an attitude of control and manipulation into a transforming life in Christ. For the legalist it means being born out of the woodpile into a tree of life.

For the ‘New Perspectives on Paul School’ it means understanding that cultural and national identities as a passport to God’s acceptance are a macro-legalism. The same is true of the inherent legalism that views one’s denomination as the ‘way’ to acceptance with God. Good theology is more than ‘the letter’ and its positions. It’s about ‘seeing how to see’ and living in the union with God that is already ours in Jesus.

BLINDNESS UNMASKED
There’s a reason why those embedded in a law culture lack spiritual discernment. ‘The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit’ 1 Cor 2.14 NIV. If we are in the law we are not in the Spirit. It is not the non-believer being cited here. It’s the person who lives in law/religion who cannot see and thinks that only the law has substance. But the law is actually a something and nothing compared to the incarnated life of Jesus as you.

In the post cross age, we are not just near God. We are not just positioned near Christ. By the incarnation Christ has become us* by the Spirit. The cleverness of the new birth is that Christ becomes us so that we may become ourselves as sons and daughters of God. Legalism denies the spirit of sonship leaving a label that could have been the reality of Christ for us and expressed as us.

NO INTERVENING LAYERS
There is no dualism in Kingdom Life, other than the truth that we are alive in Christ and dead in anything else. Davis Marshall observes, “Nondual Christianity is experiential spirituality. It is an immediate experience of oneness with God, Christ, and all of Creation. It is unity with all that exists. This may sound like pantheism to some Christians, but I assure you it is not. Pantheism is a religious philosophy, a philosophical worldview, an intellectual understanding of the universe. Christian nonduality is not an intellectual understanding. It is a direct apprehension of the Divine. It transcends thought and religion.” (1) It’s union with God and as such union with life. You will be alive in Christ your life. Semi-alive and undead in the law and religion. Why be a band of dead folks squawking?

* We are not deities but we are sons/daughters. Incarnation means that His Spirit manifests as our spirit, soul and body.
(1) Davis, Marshall. Experiencing God Directly: The Way of Christian Nonduality (p. 2). Marshall Davis. Kindle Edition.