January 30, 2014
The Sins of the World
I wonder if we sometimes hear a phrase so often
that it loses its impact. Our preachers will talk in terms of Jesus taking upon
Himself the sins of the world, but I’m not sure that I personalize that thought
to be “my sins.” Martin Luther (1520)
wrote that when we accept Jesus, as a bride is united to the bridegroom, Christ
and the soul become one and have everything in common. “This means what Christ
possesses belongs to the believing soul; and what the soul possesses belongs to
Christ. Thus Christ possesses all good things and holiness; these now belong to
the soul. The soul possesses lots of vices and sin, these now belong to
Christ.” Paul’s words to the Corinthians is similar, “God made him who had no
sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2
Cor 5:21 NIV)
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Gail;
-----Actually, the groom/bride analogy made in the Bible is of the Hebrew culture. The partnership aspect Luther hangs upon it, therefore, would be less accurate than the bride, herself, belonging to the groom. But the bride’s identity is no more consumed by the groom than Christ is the trailing edge of time eating every particular of existence into the belly of some homogenous Nirvana. The reason God sacrificed His Son to save anyone who would turn was that He loves us for who we are. This doesn’t mean He loves our sins since we yet do sin. It means our sins are no longer who we are because they are not who we want to be. God has graciously granted us our desires to be free of sin, and now, in Christ Jesus, that’s who we are - free. So, even though we yet sin, we no longer have sin because we don‘t want it and so through Christ don't have it. Christ died because of our sin; we died to it. Neither of us has it.
-----I am as much my spirit as I am my body. The body is so overwhelmingly present in our consciousness that this realization drowns in its mental noises. The body is a thing of place and time. It can no more be in two places at once than two things can be in its place at once. Then, if everything else from one boundary of physical existence to the other completely stood still - no motion whatsoever, not even the vibration of one atom or the spin of one electron - time would have no meaning, and place would be everything. In a very real sense, time is a measure of motion as things exchange places. A day is one turn of the earth upon it’s axis. A year is one billion one hundred fifty seven million miles traveled around the Sun. Of course, don’t think our trek around the Sun measures time; it makes it. We just use it to co-ordinate our memories, currently happening events, and expected events with everything else.
-----The body exists seemingly now, and now registers upon our minds as the momentarily unique shape everything just was. But really, now is as much the moment when God created the physical universe as it is the moment when it all flees from the presence of Him who sits upon the Great White Throne. Everything's motions just have not yet progressed to there, where He awaits. In the physical realm now is every erg of energy squeezed into some matter or the rest of it acting upon that matter, while in the spiritual world it is simultaneously the exact shape of everything at any and all moments as marked by the slightest motion, as well as every thought and emotion of every mind expressed in every mental way beyond and including those which move the body into actions. The spirit is all at once everything the soul has been or will be, including the sequential sense of its movements as they were expressed through the body into the physical world.
-----I believe that while we are saved in Christ our sin still makes its mark upon the physical existence, which will eventually flee from God. But our sins by God‘s will are no mark upon or aspect of our spirits. We have a dead man of the body for expressing our sins. He physically dies of them. We have a living man who does not (our spirits,) for it has separated from the essence of our physical being to be combined with the essence of God’s Spirit. Thus, we died with Christ to be reborn in Him. And our bodies express some of that reborn stuff, too.
-----Jesus’ moment on the cross was just an instant in time. It’s meaning is marked in the spiritual world. Every spirit of those calling upon Christ is drained of every trace of anything not matching God’s will, all of it having drained into that moment and place of Christ on the cross and left there. The physical realm is a trash can of which the open lid is the cross. Christ and we through Him merely gave all our sins the slip and left them there from where we escaped.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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