In the same flesh that was pierced with a spear, every eye will see Him and He will judge the nations. In that same flesh, He is with us now. It is not only in His Deity, but in His perfected and glorified flesh, the very same flesh in which He was tempted and crucified, that Jesus Christ is everywhere and dwells within believers – and we in Him. In fact, it is through dwelling in His humanity that we dwell in His Deity, for the Deity and the humanity are of one person: the Son of God. It is in Him – in His humanity, in His resurrection – that we are perfected and glorified. His death is our justification, but His resurrection is our salvation.
Category: Motivation: The Vision of God
Salvation: Heaven From the Foundations of the World
Then, all creation will be “filled with the knowledge of YHWH, even as the waters cover the sea.” All creation – even the present, even the distant past – will be filled with the glory of the Resurrection. “Those He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, so that He might become the firstborn among many brethren. Those He predestined, He also called. Those He called He also justified. Those He justified He also glorified.” This indicates something of the nature of salvation to me. Salvation is an eternal work. In Philippians, Paul writes, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to do His good pleasure.” Salvation is the action of God. Just as Jesus is “the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world,” so salvation is eternal. God has not only foreknown and predestined His children from before the world began. He has also justified them and even glorified them [Read more…] from before the world began. Our salvation is real; it is an eternal truth. The full revelation of our salvation will be in the Second Coming of Christ. “He will appear again, not this time to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for Him.” “All creation groans, as in the labor of child-bearing, until the day when the children of God shall be revealed. For the creation was not subjected to futility through its own will, but through the will of Him who subjected it, in hope, that the creation also would share in the glory and liberty of the children of God.” So, when Paul writes, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” he is telling us to live out the salvation that Jesus Christ has already perfected. We live out this salvation because God Himself is working in us to perfect in us the salvation that Jesus Christ perfected on the cross and revealed in His resurrection. The Holy Spirit Himself, the “very flame of YHWH” dwells in us; how else shall we respond to such near presence of the Holy God except with trembling and fear, except with holy terror? In a certain sense, the whole battle of living the Christian life on earth is to stop fighting – to surrender, to trust and believe. Our salvation is already complete. We simply have to live in that salvation – to abide in Jesus. It is about realizing in our bodily life the complete union with the Resurrection of the Incarnate Son of God which, even now, is ours, is our life. “For your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you, too, will appear with Him in glory.” Just before this, it is written, “Therefore, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” The whole battle is already won. “In all these things, we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.” The glory and the honor and the praise belong to Jesus Christ alone. He has died and paid the debt for sin; He has filled death with His life; He has risen from the grave and ascended, as man, to the right hand of God Almighty. As it is said many times, “Salvation is of the Lord.” It ought to be – it is – effortless to live out that victory. The victory is already complete. “I have overcome the world.” It is not, “I will overcome the world.” It is already done! Even so, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Him.” Even now, we are, truly and by Divine mercy, seated in heaven with Him. We will wear crowns because we are, in very fact, made one with Him, and so His merit, virtue, and victory is, in very fact, our merit, our virtue, and our victory. We will throw them at His feet because it is all His free gift; every crown is His, the merit and the virtue and the victory is all His; we added nothing. He did everything. Nonetheless, who has ever completely entered into that victory this side of death? Who has ever realized this truth? Who has walked wholly in the Eternal Spirit who lives in us and with us? It is, though, no more of an issue how, though “having been justified through faith in Jesus Christ, we have peace with God,” yet we can and do still fall for the desires of the flesh, than how it is that we were (and yet are) sinners and yet are glorified in Him. He filled our sin and death with His righteousness and life. In the end, we will see that made manifest in all creation – in every single moment that has ever been, is, or ever will be, throughout all the breadth and height and depth and length of all creation, indeed, in eternity. It is my belief that all is Heaven. This is not to deny hell or the punishment of the wicked. It is to say that it is the lesser reality. Heaven is Real. Heaven is the immediate presence of God, in His goodness and His love. Thus, Heaven is reality. Heaven is good. God will be all in all; Jesus Christ will be all in all. What else is Heaven? Jesus Christ is the Resurrection and the Life; God is He whom to know is eternal life. That He is all in all means that Heaven is everywhere. God is Love. This is not to deny that God hates; God hates as only Himself can hate, not despite – o wretched thought! – but because He is Love. God's fierce, burning hatred towards sin is the expression of His Love toward evil; it is what His Love looks like from the view-point of that fall into ruin and horror. Some think that hatred and love are opposites; in fact, they are no such thing. Those who think so know nothing of real love or of real hatred. Love is the greater reality. Good exists, pure and undiminished, without evil. So, Love is, pure and undiminished, strong and glorious, without any evil to evoke hatred. Goodness and Love is the reality, the real thing; evil is the departure, the falling-away, the turning from Reality upon itself, and, therefore, into ruin – a ruin more horrible than words can ever say. The fact that evil is not true as Good is true is not to diminish its evil – it is simply to say that it is evil. The ruin of that which God, the Lord of Love and Goodness, has made and declared good is horrendous beyond all the imagination of man. Only God, being Love Himself, knows how evil, how completely deserving of disdain and hatred, this ruin of His good creation, this twisting of His Goodness, is. That is hell – death – sin full-grown – sin revealed to the sinner, or is it God revealed to the sinner? To say that hell means the natural consequence of sin, that it is, in fact, indistinguishable from the sin which brings it forth, that hell means that a creature has turned its gaze to itself, the gaze which ought to have been the channel of life and goodness from God to the creature and of worship from the creature to God, and, thus, is separated from goodness and life by its own choice, fallen into ruin and torment – to say that hell means that God has turned His back on sin, has thrust the sinful one from Him into the darkness outside with unimaginable scorn and hatred, that hell is exile from the presence of God because of His holiness, holiness which still sears the exile because God is Real, the only Reality, from which the exiled one came into being and exists. It is just two different ways of saying the same thing. In one sense, they are separated from God; in another, Heaven is hell to them, precisely because their own sin is their hell. They do not know God in His Son. “No man can see My face and live,” God told Moses, but He hid him in the cleft of the rock. He hides His children in the pierced side of Jesus – Heaven. Jesus Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. He descended to the depths and ascended to the heights so that He might fill all things. He is altogether lovely. He Himself is life, is Heaven. His love overshadowed our lives and filled them with goodness, worked all things together for our good, even the most horrible, the most dreadful, the most ruinous acts of sin-cursed nature or, worse, sinful men, and this, even while we did not know Him, did not know that He is good, did not believe His love. This, I understand, is part of why in Romans St. Paul does not say, “We know that in all things God works for the good of those that love Him,” and then stop there, but he goes on to say, “the called according to His purpose.” Even when we were only called, even when we were completely blind and had no inkling of the light of Heaven that was, nonetheless, all around us and in which we swam, still He worked everything for our good. For, I hesitate to call “only called.” In His knowledge, from our view-point, foreknowledge – and all God knows is true – we were glorified with His Son. In Christ's ascension, we were glorified. Salvation is judgment – is God's revelation of His truth – that His children are His children, one with His Son in His crucifixion and death, in His burial, in His mighty resurrection, His glorious ascension. Yes, even God's revelation of His Truth, Jesus Christ who said, “I am... the Truth,” for salvation is that “we shall see Him as He is,” indeed, salvation is, “we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” Yes, salvation is God's revelation of the Truth, His own Son and Word, for “When Christ, who is our life, appears, we, too, will appear with Him in glory.” Even now, we “behold with unveiled faces as in a mirror the glory of the Lord and are transformed in that same image from glory to glory, as from the Spirit, who is the Lord.” Judgment is that all things shall be what, indeed, they are. The appearance of the Son of Man is the judgment of the world – to us who believe, salvation. Then, all creation will be “filled with the knowledge of YHWH, even as the waters cover the sea.” All creation – even the present, even the distant past – will be filled with the glory of the Resurrection. “The ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.” Copyright 2018 Raina Nightingale
Salvation: Sharing in the Life of the Triune God
The goal of the Christian life, salvation itself, is, apparently, a participation in the life of the Trinity. This may well be the greatest mystery in Christianity; perhaps it is, for in it is bound up the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation. But, what can it possibly mean that human beings, mere creatures, are called and given to share in the very life of the Triune Godhead? How can this even be? “Or do you not know that those of us who were baptized, were baptized into His death? For we died with Christ through baptism into death in order that by the power of God the Father, who raised Christ from the dead, we too might walk in newness of life… For, if we have become partakers of His death, we will also be partakers of His resurrection.” “I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I that live, but Christ that lives in me. The life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.” “For we are the members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones.”
I Will Look Upon Your Face in Righteousness: How Can I Envy Though My Enemies Have All Their Desire
Yes, Lord, whom shall we envy? You have given us all the real good there is, Your very self, that we shall see Christ just as He is - look upon Your face in righteousness - and that we shall be like Him, be conformed to His image - be satisfied with Your likeness when we awake. Yes, to live is Christ, to die is gain. There is no good anywhere but You, for You are the only good, a good more real than the ground upon which we stand or the air we breathe.
(Part II) The Wonder of the Trinity: Father, Son, Spirit
We tread on very holy ground here. How sacred and unfathomable are the mysteries of the Trinity and the union of the Persons of our Triune God! Let us approach with care in reverence and awe, and take warning that if we think that we have grasped Him with our minds, it is not God upon whom we gaze. This mystery of the relationships of the Persons of YHWH is far deeper, higher, and wider than is the truth that God is One. It is hidden under His train, veiled by the unapproachable light and the rainbow like an emerald that is round the throne. Let us take care that we do not seek to delve into the hidden things the knowledge of which God has reserved to Himself alone, but approach in worship to receive that which He would disclose to all His children, to whom His gift is Himself. All we see is but a sliver of the Infinite One, and words are so poor; I can only point, and hope that someone might see that which I have seen or greater yet, or at least realize that that which they think they have seen they have not seen, for they have not seen rightly. [Read more…] We know that the Father delights in the Son and glories in glorifying Him. We have only to read the answer of the Father in the thunder to Jesus’ prayer to glorify His name in the Temple in Jerusalem, “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.” Or Jesus’ words at the end of John 13. “Now is the Father glorified in the Son. Now that God is glorified in the Son of Man He will glorify Him and will glorify Him at once.” Or again, in John 17, in Jesus’ high priestly prayer, offered the night before He died, “Father, I will that they be with Me where I am and see My glory, the glory that You gave Me because You loved Me before the creation of the world.” Or again, much earlier in His ministry, after His baptism, “This is My beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased,” or after His transfiguration, “This is My beloved Son; listen to Him.” Then, there are passages like this one in John chapter 10. “For this reason the Father loves me, that I lay down My life for the sheep. It is not taken from Me; I lay it down freely and I take it up again. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from My Father.” Of course, the Cross is the greatest and most complete demonstration of Who God is. I believe that the Cross (and Resurrection and Ascension, for they are all, in fact, one thing) actually completely and adequately expresses Who God is; the incompleteness and inadequacy is all in our finiteness (and, while we live on earth, sin). Jesus is the complete and perfect image of the Father. He is as the Father is. And since Who God is is entirely One, Holy, there can be no diminishing of it; were it to be diminished it would not even be a mangled or poor representation or image of the Perfection, it would be something of a different kind entirely. All that the Father is, Jesus is. Jesus is like the Father as no created being is like another being. He is perfectly like the Father, completely like the Father. So, one may very well say that what Jesus does the Father does (of course, Jesus alone is the incarnate God). “I am in My Father and He is in Me.” “The Father living in Me does the works that I do.” The Son and the Father are different Persons, but by love They perfectly live through and in each other. It is mystery unspeakable. So, when Jesus lays down His life for the sheep and takes it up again, He perfectly represents Who the Father is. What is more, God is eternal. He acts and He works, but all His works are the expression of His eternal nature; one may say that they are the form His eternal character takes when He enters into time or through the lens of time. (Let no one think that I am denying that God is the Living God or that He is free to do as He pleases. God alone is truly free. He does exactly as He pleases and He is under no constraint; that is, He acts in perfect accord with Himself and His actions are not in any way limited or defined by anything or anyone except His own will. Moreover, He has seen and planned all of time from eternity, so all His actions in time are the expression of His eternal will, which is grounded in Himself, in the Blessed Trinity.) So, Jesus’ laying down of His life and taking up of it again is the Persons is, in very fact, where we find Their relational or Personal distinctions. Oh, how Jesus says to the Father, “Glorify the Son so that the Son may glorify You, just as You have given Him authority over all peoples so that He might give eternal life to all those You have given Him. For I have glorified You on earth by doing the work which You gave Me to do.” Essentially, Jesus is saying, “Glorify Me because I am Your Son,” or even, “Glorify Me because You are My Father,” that is, “Glorify Me because You are Yourself,” for, unlike in poor human beings or even perhaps in angels, there is no distinction, no separation, between deed and person, and Jesus is the very likeness of the Father. Or again, the Father says to the Son, “Ask of Me and I will give the nations as Your inheritance, the very ends of the earth as Your possession,” and the Son says, “I chose you,” but they are “those whom You have given to Me. All I have is Yours and all You have is mine, and glory has come to Me through them.” How can the Father and the Son both choose? Because They are one. The Father is all-goodness, infinite and eternal. That is His nature, His essence. The Son is the Son, Word, and Image of the Father. As such, He must have the same nature as the Father, be like to the Father. Only all-goodness, infinitude, and eternity are like all-goodness, infinitude, and eternity. There is only one all-goodness, infinitude, or eternity, by very definition, by intrinsic reality. Knowing the same, loving the same, willing the same, not by any arbitrary constraint of sameness but by natural spontaneity or spontaneous nature, by love, the Son can freely choose without constraining the free choice of the Father and vice versa. Herein is the perfect, free, and Divinely dignified obedience and submission of the Son! “He did not count equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself empty, taking the form of a servant, and being found in appearance as a man He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted Him...” His deepest obedience and humiliation is as free and Divine an act – maybe more so, if we can use such words when speaking of God – as the creation of the world, for He was with the Father there. Love! There is nothing more beautiful or wondrous to me than the perfect oneness in love of the Father and the Son. Love! What a word, and how little we know of it as yet, or ever shall know, for the Love of God, the Love which is God (for all that God is, all of God is), is infinite! There is no question whether the Divine Persons are One because They love one another or love one another because They are One. Their Oneness is Their love and Their love is Their Oneness. Their love is Their relational distinctions and Their relational distinctions Their love. So also, Their Oneness and Their relational distinctions are one and the same. And then, there is the Spirit of God. Doubtless, no less Personal than are the other Two. He is spoken of as the Spirit of God who alone knows the things of God and as the Mind of Christ which is given to us who believe. How can God’s Spirit or Mind be less personal than He Himself is? In John chapter 14, Jesus says, “I will ask of My Father and He will give you another Advocate, the Spirit of Truth, whom the world has not known… but you will know Him, for He lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans. I will come to you.” No impersonal force could ever be a Comforter like the Lord Jesus. “When He comes, the Spirit of Truth whom I will send to you from the Father, He will testify about Me.” Only a person testifies. “The Spirit of Truth, when He comes, will take of what is Mine and declare it to you.” Again, only a person can do that. Nor may the Spirit ever be confused with either the Father or the Son. The same Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Son, and, thus, neither the Father nor the Son. He is the Spirit of the Father and the Son, of God, and God Himself. “You are no longer controlled by the flesh, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ He does not belong to Christ. But if you have the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead then He who raised Jesus will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who lives in you.” Likewise, the Spirit is called the Spirit of God or the Father innumerable times, but He is also known as the Spirit of Truth – notably, in that very same passage where Jesus says, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by Me.” I don’t know what to say about the Spirit and His relationship to the Father and the Son. These verses more or less say it all. Perhaps this: “the Spirit, in whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.” It is the Spirit who lives the life of the Son of God in us, crying “Abba! Father!” in our hearts and testifying with our spirit that we are the children of God. It is the Spirit who shows us Jesus – “He will convict the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment” – and makes living waters to flow from us. Yet, it is the Father who draws us and the Son who draws us, and also it is the Father who sanctifies us and the Son who sanctifies us. Just as the Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father, so also with the Spirit. In the Spirit, the Father lives in us and in the Spirit the Son lives in us; see John chapter 14, “We will come to him and make our home with him.” And the Spirit lives and works in the Father and the Son. It is perhaps this verse in Hebrews, “He, through the eternal Spirit, offered Himself without spot to God,” that lifted the corner of the veil on the glories of the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit Divine! Father, Son, and Spirit of Love! God dwells in unapproachable light and Him no man – or angel – can ever see, for we are told in John that it was Christ whom Isaiah saw, whose train filled the temple and in whose presence Seraphim hid their faces and their feet. In the Son we – and all creation – see and know the Father: “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” “This is eternal life: to know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” It is the Spirit who shows us Christ and lives in us, who “takes of what is [His] and makes it known to [us].” The Son lives in us. The Father lives in us. The Spirit lives in us. It is the Spirit who is the guarantee of our salvation, but “No one can snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all, and no one can snatch them out of His hand.” O, Blessed and Sacred Trinity, God Most Holy and Most High! Blessed be Your name through all the ages, glory forever and forever, world without end. O, to have the Blessed Trinity dwelling in our hearts! To gaze forever upon and live forever with this God of love! Copyright 2017 Raina Nightingale
(Part I) The Wonder of the Trinity: God is One
God is One. There are three distinct Divine Persons. These two truths have been held by Christians throughout the ages. They form the basis for our understanding of the faith. With the doctrines of the Person and Work of Jesus Christ and the Incarnation they stand at the very center of the Christian faith. Indeed, without a right understanding of the Nature of God and the Trinity the mystery of the Incarnation is nonsense, and without the Incarnation the Cross and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ are equally nonsense.
The Image of God and the Firstborn over all Creation: God must be all in all
It is only fitting that in all things good God should reign supreme, that everything that is not rebellion, that is, defiance against His nature and law, God should fill. There shall be no goodness had by any creature, no good role held or enacted by any creature, that does not belong to God! This is fulfilled in God's Messiah.
Enthralled By Love 