Mt 5:8

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."

We cannot be neutral about sin. Everything we do informs who we are; repetition forms habit, and habit forms character. Grasping our true identity in Christ is crucial, as this is what will keep us from sin. It is therefore also that which Satan seeks to obscure via sin. His strategy is, as usual, based upon a half-truth. He takes it one step further by telling us: "This that you are doing now: this is who you are." The lie is clever because it affirms a deeper lie: "You are your own creator: you make yourself what you are." And there is the subtlety, for as Jesus says, "As a man thinks, so he is." The reality is that the Holy God of Love is both our Creator and our Redeemer, and that we had as much to do with the latter as we did with the former. He has set His love upon us before the foundation of the world. We are as incapable of damning ourselves as we are of saving ourselves: in Christ, we are a new creation. But this is not a recipe for lethargy: the opposite is true. The Man Christ is our true image, our pioneer, our forbear, our head. He went before us that we might follow after Him. God did not merely become a man: He became Man that men may become able to live a divine life. We can no longer blame human nature for our flaws, for the Lamb of God has taken away the sins of – wait for it – the World! Hallelujah! 

Feast

Continuing with T. F. Torrance, and having asked the Spirit to open this truth to me, I awake in the small hours with indigestion – I am filled with the richness of this word. I feel not merely satisfied, but bloated and dizzied by the need to digest it further, and allow its goodness to nourish the roots of my being. More, to share this feast with brothers and sisters, and all who would come to taste and see! With every mouthful, more and more light is shed. I begin to see just how radical, united and all-pervasive the truths of the Trinity and Incarnation really are. What Christianity truly is. Or, better, Who Christ truly is. The immensity of that recognition. There is no other messenger who is simultaneously his own message, and through whose bodily resurrection and ascension into total unity with the God in whom all things exist, is really present in every place where that message is preached (listen up, Catholics) or enacted in the sacraments (listen up, Protestants). Romans 10:6, 8b-11: "...the righteousness based on faith says... 'The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart' (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim) because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved."

The light shed upon passages such as this is that as we, united with Christ, the one who has successfully united all of humanity in its fallenness with God in his holiness, con-fess (lit. 'say together with' [Him]) his truth, then in that moment He is truly present. The Church does not talk 'about' Christ - it preaches Christ in person. He is the Word of God Who is Himself personally present in the preaching of His word.

Where else have we failed to recognize the real presence of Christ? The Father, Son and Spirit are inseparably One. Christ is never present to us except by His Spirit. Where the Spirit is, the Son is, and where the Son is, the Father is too. The ascension means that the God-Man who redeems all is now present to every moment of time and point of space, past, present and future. The Incarnation was a completely new experience to God, and the resurrection and ascension made it permanent. Formerly perishable Humanity now shares in God's eternity. This, too, is completely new. And a formerly perishable cosmos can now be redeemed and transformed by the One through Whom and for Whom it was made. In the resurrected and ascended Christ, the first tract of land is added to the Kingdom of God; the Firstfruits of the new creation, a redeemed human body united with the Godhead, is the beachhead of the divine invasion that will see the glory of The Lord fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.

In His ascension, Jesus Christ has humanised the universe forever. To say that Jesus is at God's right hand means that He is everywhere. 

Good News!

The Spirit has been teaching me about the good news of Jesus Christ. For years, I have been labouring under a misapprehension about Christ, tempted to believe the lie that in His incarnation, He somehow 'cheated'. It would present sthg like this: there was only ever one human being who managed to live without sin, but, hang on a minute - isn't it strange that this unique individual also just happened to be Almighty God in human form? I knew that God is good, and that this formulation represented a warped perspective, but I struggled to see the right viewpoint, exactly. T. F. Torrance (in works such as Atonement) points, instead, to Christ's vicarious humanity. It is not just that Jesus died for me, it is that He lived for me. When the Son of God took the nature of a man, assuming the humanity of Jesus into His divine self, he did not merely assume the nature of Adam before the fall, but the fallen nature of Adam inherited through Mary. If this is so, then every moment of Christ's existence was both God's judgement on the sin ingrained in human nature and a demonstration of His righteousness. Like the twin strands of DNA, the divine and human natures co-existed in Christ. At every moment, the perfect eye of God beheld unflinchingly the sinful tendency of what was truly now His own nature, and yet refused to be controlled by it. Salvation is therefore in the very person of Jesus Christ, not merely in His death. In fact, His cross can make no sense without His life. He could only be the spotless lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world if He did, in fact, lead a perfectly spotless life in the presence of the fallible humanity He had made His own. Suddenly this becomes my gospel. Suddenly He becomes my Saviour. Suddenly the gospel is Good News. The Cross then becomes the clincher, the perfect end to the perfect life. It is the end of the reign of Sin, and three days later, it will be gloriously confirmed as the end of the reign of death. It was God's mercy that Jesus had to live no more than the requisite 33 years. What He did proved that I can defeat sin, because He has given me a new nature – His nature. In union with Him, just as He is in union with the Father, and empowered by the same life-giving Spirit, I can live my life in all righteousness. There is nothing stopping me from triumphing over sin. I can look every temptation, every urge, every lazy passion, in the eye, saying: It is finished! No more! In Christ, I am a new creation! If He became fully human, if He really suffered the same burden of sinful flesh as I do, then I can do nothing but rejoice and praise Him. The Spirit brought to mind the interwoven blue and scarlet threads in the High Priest's ephod. How they were closely, inseparably interwoven, and yet distinct. The human and divine natures of Christ were perfectly united, yet never commingled.

*J*O*Y*

Exult! Erupt! It's all too much!

Our God is King! Our King is Love!

The stars that sang while Earth began

Are singing still, the cry that thrilled

Through all the trillion throng, the song That filled the sky until it rang,

Is ringing still. The faithful sun

That runs his daily race, his face

Agleam with joy, is beaming still.

The trusty wheel that turns the year

From icy winter into spring's

Refreshing, then to summer cheer,

Is turning still, the Father's vow

Still proving, and the darkest rain

By rainbows answered, even now.

And it can never be contained -

It leaps and grows and overflows;

The sweetest gladness sears the heart,

The finest electricity

Facilitates felicity

The mind reclines, the spirit soars,

And laughter shakes the very boards!

A snigger, then a giggle, then

A titter, chuckle, chortle-snort!

Guffaws grow into belly-laughs

And crowing, hooting, cackles, shrieks,

Hysteric fits that last for weeks!

And just when you can take no more,

The Spirit who began it all

Begins to fall, and tears are shed

That drain our sorrows to the floor.

The bells ring for the wedding feast:

Come all, the greatest and the least,

Prepare the way, deck out the halls,

The King has paid the price for all!

Now ev'ry road with flowers pave,

To greet the conqu'ror of the grave!

And ev'ry voice in Heav'n and Earth

Rejoice to hail the Lord of Mirth!

Fili