Thursday, November 20, 2014

It's not the negatives

The Lord Jesus did not live a victorious life just because He did not commit sin in the negative sense; because He did not tell lies, because He was not dishonest; because He never committed adultery, and was never envious—that was not the mature of His victory. If that had been the nature of His victory and that the criterion of His righteousness, He could have stayed in heaven and been all that! The nature of His victory was that as Man He positively implemented that purpose for which He was incarnate; that apart from not doing the thing that were wrong, He positively accomplished all that was right; that His absolute availability to the Father for every moment of 33 years enabled the Father in His deity to do in and through the Son in His humanity all that had been agreed on between the Father and the Son before ever the world was.— The Saving Life of Christ, page 146

<idle musing>
If you wade through all the negative statements in that paragraph, you end up with a very Patristic thought: God became man that man might become God (Athanasius). Not God in the sense the Mormons mean! And not God in the sense of Nirvana—absorbed into the divine. But God in the sense of theosis (or divination as it is more commonly called in the western church). Union with Christ, sanctification, growing in grace, death to self, the exchanged life, deliverance from sin, add your favorite phrase here...they all mean the same thing. And that's what the Christian life is all about...
</idle musing>

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