"It’s in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for." Eph. 1:11 MSG
God is opening my eyes more to understand more about the Incarnation,
and I wanted to write some more thoughts here: The Word is the sum of
God’s thought, the expression of His very Being, His sharing of Himself,
the outshining of who He is – Jesus Christ is the final and clear Word
of God, the express image of His Person and the exact picture of God in a
flesh body!
This Word of God became flesh and appeared in tangible form on earth,
and looking at Him we saw what we ourselves were made of, saw our
design and origin, saw ourselves truly for who we really are, saw our
true identity! We saw that we are expressions of God as well, saw that
we are like Him and are actually His children, derived from Him as our
source and belonging to Him. We saw that we are in Him, connected with
Him, for His is our origin and life in whom we exist! We also saw who
God is, what the essence of God is, His true nature and identity! Some
of the Old Testament accounts may have confused us about who God is,
made us wonder if He was mean or demanding or harsh, but we could trust
the picture of God that Jesus gave us, being His exact image and
likeness, the final word about Him! And what a relief to find out
through Jesus what God is really like – loving, caring, non-judgmental,
forgiving, healing, kind, generous, non-vindictive, non-retaliatory,
approachable, open, welcoming, accepting, inviting, good – full of
GRACE! So in Him we see God and ourselves, too!
So what I am seeing so far is wonderful: Jesus showed us our origin
in God, that we are from Him and thus truly His children. Jesus showed
us God’s true nature was that of a loving, gracious Father and also our
own identity was that of beloved children. So He revealed to us our
origin in God and our identity as God’s children.
But now God is showing me something even more beautiful…Jesus also
showed us not only our origin but also our destiny in God! The Word is
our very origin, for through Him we were made and of Him we were made –
He is our blueprint, our spiritual DNA and the very fabric of our being!
So being our Origin, Creator and Original Design/Blueprint, He has a
connection and a claim on us that is prior to and superior to the
connection we have with Adam, or Adam’s sin! God is showing me that
part of what that means is that when Jesus came, He truly represented
man in a bigger and deeper way than Adam, because we came from the Word
before we ever came from Adam! So everything Jesus did He did as the
true head and origin of our race, and so everything He did applied to
us, was passed down to us, became true of us, affected us! He took us
into His reality and brought us with Him into everything He did, every
choice He made, everything He experienced, all the way through His
earthly trust and obedience to the Father, through His death to sin on
the cross and to His resurrection in life and ascension to reign in
glory by the Father’s side! That’s our history and destiny now, all
wrapped up in what Christ did!
I like to walk in the little patch of woods behind our house every
morning and see the sun filter through the leafy trees, and it is there
that I ponder the things I am learning in the class, and God walks with
me and helps me understand things. The other day I was thinking with
Him as I walked, thinking about all the mistakes I’d made in life and
some of the messed up areas of my experience. I was feeling pretty bad
and ashamed of some of these areas. And God started showing me in a new
way what Jesus did and is doing for me, that when He came, it was like
He went back into the garden (which had become a wilderness because of
Adam’s sin) and where Adam had fallen into temptation, HE overcame the
temptation! Where Adam had eaten of the knowledge of good and evil tree
and made a space for evil to ‘exist’, and thus saw things unravel from
their true design, Jesus ate only of the Life tree and didn’t allow evil
to ‘exist’, thus things came out just as they were designed to be!
Where Adam’s fall had sent creation in a downward spiral toward
nothingness, Jesus’ trust in God sent creation on an upward spiral into
eternal life in enjoyment of God’s presence in and through all! Jesus
entered this mess we humans had made and worked everything backward into
life..He rewrote my history and gave me His destiny, for my existence
is truly all wrapped up in Him now, not in Adam! Jesus had a prior
claim on me that went back farther than Adam, so all He did representing
me becomes mine and outweighs anything Adam had done! The grace of the
cross and resurrection outweighed the fall into legalism! Life
outweighed death! Light eliminated darkness!
It reminded me of a movie we watched with the kids – Meet the
Robinson’s. In this movie, two orphan boys share a room in the
orphanage, and one boy (Louis) keeps the other little boy (Goob) up late
one night because he is working on a science project. Because Goob had
not gotten his sleep, he falls asleep during the championship baseball
game, missing an important catch, causes his team to lose the game, and
suffers the anger and rejection of his teammates. Goob’s life
degenerates from there and he never recovers from this terrible day – he
turns to a criminal lifestyle and wants to ruin Louis’ life. Through
his evil deeds, he the world gets taken over by an evil robot (you’d
have to see the movie for this to make sense, but anyway..) Louis,
however, becomes an inventor and builds a time machine. He has a chance
to go backward in time and save the world from the evil robot..and
while he is back there in the past, he goes to the baseball game that
fateful day, calls out ‘Goob!’ loudly at just the right moment,
awakening Goob, who catches the baseball, causing the team to win the
championship game, making him a hero and changing his life into a good
and happy one! Louis actually changes Goob’s destiny through his one
simple act of kindness! And he saves the whole world too! There is a
scene in the movie where the whole world, shrouded in dark colors, all
ruined and ugly, suddenly gets transformed into a beautiful world full
of color and sunshine, all because of Louis’ going back and fixing
history to make it come out right..I love that scene, and it makes me
think of what happened when Jesus died and rose, it was like washing the
whole creation with grace and life and transforming everything from the
decay and degeneration into nothingness into the way it was designed to
be all along, full of God’s beautiful and glorious and radiant LIFE,
LOVE and LIGHT!
He swallows up evil, sins, shame, guilt, wrong beliefs, lies, false
identity, struggles, depression, sickness, decay, accusations,
condemnation, violence, suspicion, feelings of separation, hatred, wars,
religious thinking, and even death…swallows it all up in Life! He
makes His history and destiny mine! He takes all the messes I’ve made in
this life and works them into victories..makes sin work backward into
innocence…makes nothingness of lies into the substance of His
reality…makes darkness into light…makes death into life! He will make
everything come out right in the end, right all wrongs, making everyone
friends again, healing all hurts, making everything whole and perfect…He
has already done it all, already reconciled all to Him, and I really
believe that all will come to experience that fully, that it will be
fully manifested at last! Heaven on earth, in us and through us, and
the future has already started! To me, the Incarnation was the
beginning of this wonderful unworking of death into life! Wow, it just
gives me such relief and joy that He has made everything okay and will
manifest that okay-ness, that completeness, righting all my messes and
making everything beautiful again in my life..it gives me such hope and
joy…not one of my messes or sin disasters is permanent and beyond
fixing…He has already brought harmony again through the cross and will
manifest this making everything well between all people, so we are all
enjoying our relationship with God and with each other…all will be
well..and God will be all in all!
