God's Promises to the Hidden Man
III. Return to Eden
This is where we start. We start with the way it was, because the way it was is the way it is supposed to become. In the beginning, there was no dualism—no dichotomy between heaven and earth, no separation between the nature of God and the nature of man. Man bore the image of God, and all creation reflected God's nature.
By this, everything pointed back to God for its ultimate sense of meaning and purpose. Nothing competed with God for attention. Everything served by its perfection to draw attention back to God. Nothing drew attention to itself.
In creating man amidst creation, God gave man a two-fold avenue of relationship with Himself. One was direct fellowship and interpersonal communion. The other was through creation. God gave man a certain sense of fulfilment to be obtained through creation. The fulfilment was in turn two-fold: calling and companionship.
God gave man to keep a garden and to love a woman. There was fulfilment, meaning, and purpose in all this. But because all of creation reflected God's nature, all this "creationary fulfilment" for man only brought Him closer to God. Creationary fulfilment reinforced man's relationship with God.
Do you see those two overall levels of relationship and fulfilment? One was direct through God, the other to God through creation. There was fulfilment in God. Then there was fulfilment in God through creation ("creationary fulfilment")—needs, desires, whose fulfilment brought man closer to God.
It's important to see this two-fold aspect of our fulfilment because it is the model that explains why today it is still important to strive for fulfilment directly in God ("holiness"), and indirectly through creation ("faith").
IV. Fall of Man and the Call to Purified Identity
When man sinned, he obtained a nature that caused him to find all sense of meaning and purpose directly through creation. God was now in the background. Man's identity and self-awareness became geared directly to creation. His source of self-esteem and self-worth became rooted directly in the creation—the definition of all idolatry. Calling and companionship in all their myriad forms became man's gods. These became his sources of identities—all the earth-based identities we discussed last letter –inherited and acquired.
Through the death of Jesus, we have obtained the new birth. We have become new people. We have received new identity—an identity that restored us to personal fellowship with God. This new fellowship is like that which was first at Eden. Our new identity gives us our restored reference point in God through Jesus, taught by the Spirit. God wills our new identity to become purified over and against our remaining identities.
Purified identity begins with the destruction of our old relationship to creation through earth-based identities. We are to die to our old relationship to creation which we have had through our idolatrous old-life force. This destruction and death is a separation. Separation is holiness, and this is the essence of the holiness message.
Purified identity begins by losing our idolatrous first relationship to creation, reasserting and claiming meaning and purpose in Jesus Christ alone. This corresponds to the first level of Edenic relationship with God, i.e., direct relationship.
V. Purified Identity and Creationary FulfilmentBut purified identity doesn't stop with first-level relationship with God. It only begins there. God not only wills to restore our first-level relationship to Him, but also our second-level relationship with Him through creationary fulfilment. He wants us to obtain that place as it was in Eden where man found fulfilment in God through fulfilment of his needs and desires according to creationary calling and companionship. He wants us to enter restored relationship with creation that completes our relationship with Him.
Asserting the authority of our new identity over creation is part of the purifying of our new identity. Therefore, as part of our salvation and part of our new man, God has implanted us at new birth with an entire spiritual "genetic code" of needs and desires to be obtained by faith through creationary fulfilment. He has implanted us with a vision for calling and a vision for companionship. All of this is to be obtained here-and-now according to His promises to us—promises through scripture, through the Body of Christ, and through our own spirit.
What do we see? God is not just calling us to separation from our old relationship to creation. He is not calling us only to direct relationship with Himself. He is also calling us to perfected relationship with Him through new relationship to creation—obtained by faith. (It is this aspect of relationship with God that answers to the message of the faith movement.)
Taken together, both parts of this restored relationship are the total fulfilment of Jesus' prayer to bring heaven to earth. This is what it means to "bring in the kingdom."
Chris Anderson
written from Pleasant Valley
Prince Edward Island, Canada
First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org
05/89
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