Created Corruptible
By John Gavazzoni

The notion that we were created incorruptible is nonsense. All that God created was created corruptible, but what God has birthed is incorruptible. He created all things for the express penultimate purpose of all things becoming corrupted. Everything created moves from corruptIBLE, to corrupTED, to corrUPT, but thank God that's not the end of the story, it's the penultimate purpose leading to the ultimate purpose.

From the spirit-substance of His incorruptible children, born of His incorruptible Seed, He has created/formed/crafted/carved out from their eternality, in union with Him, the whole of the temporal, created dimension. The formation of Adam, was the corruptible personhood-summation of that whole.

But Hallelujah, because all creation traces to a birthed origin, creation will be freed from its bondage to decay, into the liberty of the freedom of the children of God. That which God has birthed as incorruptible, will transform that which He has created as corruptible. As creatures, we can add nothing to our sonship, but our sonship will infuse our creaturehood with the glory that Jesus had with the Father before the world began, and which He gave to us in eternity, for it was before His glorification that He said, "I have given them the glory I had with You before the world began."

As I've said and written many times, that which God birthed as incorruptible, and abides as incorruptible in the eternal dimension, has been made to suffer what it is not in the temporal dimension, in order that from the intolerable tension of that divisive enmity, the depth of our creaturely corruption calls out to the depths of God's incorruption in His children, to have our creaturehood returned by redemption to its birthed state of being.

By that process, a radiance, an effulgence of God's glory is called forth, and beyond what can be presently expressed, God enriches Himself, and his children with Him, out of the depths of His riches in Christ Jesus. Eternity will be enriched by this temporal process. He has done thusly for us in Christ, and out from that seminal Reality, it will become experiential to us by Christ in us, by that which is unthinkable to the human mind apart from the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, i.e., that God's Son, His Christ should die on a cross. There man's enmity met the fullest outpouring of Divine Love, for it was required that man do his worst to God, so that God might have the opportunity to do His best for man.

God, who subjected all creation to futility, also has required of Himself that He reach down into the depths of His glory to manifest His love in its full passion of tenaciously embracing and holding to His bosom the creatures still imprisoned in the enmity that cried, and still cries "crucify Him, crucify Him."

Now hear this: We did not come to our present corrupted state by thinking wrong. We were made to think wrong by being made corruptible. Certainly, in the transformation of our present state, God will effect the transformation by the renewing of our minds, but it was not our choice to think wrong that corrupted us. It was God's choice to corrupt us that lead to our presented corrupted state of mind.

It is only by the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, not as some eschatological event, but from His indwelling, by His out-shining from within our darkness that we shall be changed. Most fundamentally, it is not that we need to see ourselves as we really are, we need to see Him as He really is, which Reality is inclusive of us.

The issue of focus is extremely important. In the communion with our Father and Savior that transforms us, we are intently gazing at/into Him. What I'm emphasizing may seem to be splitting hairs, but it is not.

The New Age-ish emphasis encourages folks to seek to discover themselves, to reach into the spiritual dimension for self-discovery. The gospel is about God coming to us resplendent in His glory, to consume the egotism behind the quest for self-discovery.

Our relationship with Christ is one of union and distinction. We are one WITH Him, a unity that preserves distinction. That union fully realized experientially will not be consummated by our individual personhood being dissolved into oneness with Him. It will be fully realized in perfect communion. Being one WITH Christ, and enjoying perfect communion WITH Him—both ways of expressing the mystery of Christ—clearly indicate a Thou-Thee relationship. WITH implies more than one, yet the two being united. The reader might want to refer to our article, Transcendence and Immanence."

Are we to imagine that while the oneness of Father and the Son maintains the distinctiveness of both, e.g.,"I AND the Father are one." (Emphasis mine), that there is not a like relationship between Christ and us? As I said on a couple occasions to brethren who might be under the influence of an overly simplistic portrayal of oneness, or soon to be, "What is it that you don't understand about "and," as in, "I and the Father are one."

I am who I am, because God is who He is, and one thing is certain, He is God, and I am not. I am OF God, the fruit of His loins, and the work of His hands. He has birthed me after His kind. I am the kin of God, but there is only One whose Being is inclusive of all being, and it is not I or you. You and I are complete in Christ. Get that? I'm not complete in you, and you're not complete in me. There's a completed, and completing, all-inclusive Personhood, Jesus Christ, the Son of God/Son of Man.

When the singularity of His Personhood has been fully realized by the whole body of humanity as the completed body of Christ, then we TOGETHER can say that we are Christ, for the fulness of Him in whom all fulness dwells, shall be realized in us all together. No one member of the body of Christ can contain that fulness. The fulness of Him, in whom all the fulness of Deity dwells bodily, shall be poured out into us together in union with Him, from within us, and the single, individual body of Jesus of Nazareth, as the Last Adam, the life-giving Spirit, shall become the Reality of the whole body of humanity.

Then God shall be All in all. "There is one body and one Spirit...." so we must realize that the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and the corporate body of Christ, are not two generically different bodies. The former has become the latter while He has retained individuality. Again, the full truth presents an intellectual tension to us, in that according to Paul, He is the Head of the body, and He is the body.

The body of Jesus our Lord still exists as embodied individuality, while in the one Spirit being also the body of God's One New Humanity. He remains His individual Person, while constituting our corporate Humanity. As Witness Lee once replied to a person who asked him what his vocation was: "I work for Jesus Incorporated."