Gutting the Gospel
By John Gavazzoni

The juxtaposition and/or intersecting of the Word of God and the Gospel of God should be of great interest to those who are of the faith of Christ. If the reader will accept my definition of both, we can proceed together in this study.

It is my understanding that the Word of God is Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, our Lord, with the normatively inspired written record and explanation of His Person being found in the Old and New Testaments: That is, He, as presented to us objectively in scripture, and then unveiled subjectively to us in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, is fully all that God has to say to mankind. If we were to ask God, "What do you really have to say to us Lord?" He would answer, "He, my Son, is all that I have to say. My Word is summed up in Him and as Him."  

He is God's entire thought, idea, ideal, passion and purpose---God's Logos--- all rolled up into One MAN, Jesus Christ, as found BOTH in His individuality AND in His indwelling multiplication within the body of Christ. God has increased His Son in those who are of the faith of His Son. The glorified Body of the One is also the body of the many. There is One Body, and One Spirit.

It is also my understanding that the gospel of God – like the Word – is God, IS Jesus Christ. I favor Jonathan Mitchell's definition of the gospel as, "God's message of goodness, ease and well-being which brings God's gifts of His Spirit, His life, His grace, His power, His fairness, His peace and (above all) His love" [parenthetical insert mine]. To know Him is to know that the above is For us From God, our Father.

To repeat, Jesus of Nazareth – God's Son, the Christ, our Savior and Lord – IS God's Word, as attested by scripture. AND as that Word, He is God's good news. IMPORTANT: He is God's good news to us AS Emmanuel, God with us---God with us SO profoundly as to be One of us, and that, in His glorified Humanity.

Right now, He sits at the right hand of God above all the heavens, as God's perfected Man. His IS the finished work of God. He is all that God has been after from eternity, and His Origin is from that Primal beginning which is the eternality of God Himself. He came to us out from God, the eternal Son of the eternal Father, and BECAME Human. He did not simply add the element of humanness to Himself; He drew forth out of the essence of His unique Sonship, that true Humanness which IS the glory of God.

From the right hand of God, He ministers the Spirit of Himself to us as the Man God always desired. God always desired that He Who was BORN of the Spirit, should be fully unfolded to all creation by, and according to, the Humanness that lies at the heart of Deity. If you are still convinced that your humanity was something created out of nothing, and are unwilling to consider something better, then read no further, but if creation out of nothing strikes you as nonsensical as it does me, then read on.

There is no such thing as created spirits. God never created any spirit. Those who teach that have a distorted understanding of God as Father and Creator. Spirits are born---"That which is BORN of the Spirit, is spirit." God is "the Father of spirits." Spirits are fathered, not created. From the spirit substance of that which is born of the Spirit, God created the soil of the ground, and from that soil He formed Adam, and by that process, the True Manhood of Adam, born eternally of the Spirit, became a creature within time and space (or put another way: the Humanness within God became humanity).

Paul's breathtaking testimony of Him is that "IN Him, were all things created." All things were created within the uniquely birthed Son of God. His eternal, birthed Personhood is the containment field of all things. All creation bears the mark of His Spirit. He is the Begotten Son of the Unbegotten God. His Father has life in Himself, and gives Him to have life in Himself.

That One, in Whom all things were created, in the fullness of time came INTO all that was created IN Him, as One Man, one Human, born of a woman. Yet since all things were created in Him, He is that One Man who is the DNA of all humanity. Great is the mystery that all things, having been created in Him, when He became Human ("the Word became flesh"---in DNA form) all things were/are still in Him: the One who contains all things and in whom all things consist, stand together and cohere.

What theologians call "The Cosmic Christ" is the same One as the historic Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. In Him, God has drawn forth out of the depths of Himself, the fullness of His glory as One Human, AND as all Humanity. His Sonship is our sonship. As He proceeded out from God, we have proceeded out from Him. For St. Paul, the growth of the family of Abraham according to the line through the one seed Isaac, consummating in One Seed, Christ, is his reference point for understanding the unfolding of the Family of God.

All the children of Abraham, in respect to the economy of God, came ONLY through Isaac, and all those born traced back to Isaac are considered to be through Isaac, the children of Abraham. Likewise the spiritual Family of God has all come through the One Son, Jesus, the Christ, and in, through and by Him we are all the children of God, sharing with Him the same Sonship.

There has been of late a drifting away from holding to the Divine Humanity of Jesus Christ, suggesting or explicitly stating that it is really the Christ within His Humanity that God wants us to have and to know. That is classic Gnosticism, separating the Christ within from His embodiment. This is a denial that the Christ became Human and feeds us His glorified Humanity in the Spirit. "For in Him, dwelleth the fullness of the Godhead BODILY." It was so important to Jesus that we understand this that He spoke of it in a way that shocked His hearers. He said that "Except you eat my flesh, and drink my blood, you have no life in you."

That's a very dramatic way of saying, "you must receive Me in my Humanity to have real life, and you will receive me in all my Humanity, for I will shortly go through a process of death, burial, resurrection, ascension, exaltation, enthronement, and glorification, so that all that I AM, as God's Divine Man, will come to you in and as the Spirit, making you all the corporate form of Myself.

Please, dear brethren---since you have stayed with me as I've labored an important point---understand that "there is One Mediator between God and men, the MAN Christ Jesus." He mediates His glorified Manhood to us IN and AS the Spirit of Reality. Understand this: When God became a Man in Jesus Christ, God did not cease to be God by that metamorphosis; BUT when Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and was glorified, He did not cease to be a Man.

If we try to leave our humanity behind on our way to realizing our sonship, we leave Jesus behind, and we gut the gospel of its essence. There's a Man at the right hand of God now, transmitting Himself, WITH the whole of His Human experience to us as "the life-giving Spirit." I have to dare to say, that in order to become more spiritual, you must become more and more TRULY human. Your humanity has been sanctified in Him. "Call thou not unclean what God hath cleansed."