Identity: From Heaven to Earth
By John Gavazzoni

Part 1

"From whence camest thou?" Is there a state of being which is the hidden intrinsic source, the substance, the substructure, the essence, the spirit of our humanity that lies beyond the ages, yet having a veiled presence within the ages? As hallowed as our creaturehood is, having been shaped and formed by God Himself, might there be more to us than what the hands of God have wrought "of the dust of the ground?" With utmost conviction, I can assure you there is. You are more than you seem to be. All that you are is more than what is apparent. For in bestowing being to us, God did not begin with an act of creation, He began with an act of procreation. The truth of God as Creator is rooted in the truth of God as Father. What He created, He created out of what He birthed. God had a "material" to work with when He created the heaven and the earth. That's why all creation is dependent upon the revealing of the sons of God, for creation's hidden essence comes from the spirit-substance of the sons, and within and by them, creation is being processed back to the glory that is its Source. More on that later in our article.

With the words, "In the beginning," John's gospel quite evidently picks up on and carries on further what is revealed to us in the early chapters of Genesis, opening with the identical words. In the first and second chapters of Genesis, God is presented as our Creator, but beginning immediately in John's gospel and continuing to its end, God is pre-eminently revealed as our Father. Of those who received Christ, John writes that they were given the authority, or right, to become the children of God, "who were BORN not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of man, but of God." That authority or right, according to E. Stanley Jones, means "according to the nature of," or as Jonathan Mitchell puts it in his translation, "out of Being." Paul comes alongside with his confirmation, saying that "in Him we live and move and have our being." When he said that, he was speaking of himself and an audience of unregenerated Greeks who loved spending time philosophizing among themselves.

Read John carefully: He did NOT say "But as many as received Him, they became the children of God." What he did say is that they had been given, in their reception of Christ----out from within Being/according to the nature of being---to become God's children. Big difference. On the basis of, according to the nature of, out of their being within God's being, their heavenly reality became an eonian actuality. Our eonian existence partakes of eternal reality through the reception of, and indwelling of, our Lord Jesus Christ, who is our life. We are BIRTHED beings, from WHOM God took BIRTHED spirit-substance to create the heavens and the earth. Then out of the soil, created from our BIRTHED substance, He formed us as creatures. Your present creaturehood has, as it's spirit-essence, what you are as one BIRTHED by an act of love-union within God. You are a partaker of the begottenness of God's uniquely-begotten Son. You are OF the Seed which He IS. We need to be "born again, back up again FROM ABOVE," (the fullest meaning of "born again" as per Jonathan Mitchell) to be restored to our heavenly reality.

That's why Jesus said to Nicodemus: "If I have told you earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?" He had just gotten done telling Nicodemus about the need of being reborn, but Nicodemus was not at all ready to hear that a rebirth as an experience on earth would be a renewal of the eternal birth which all humanity has in union with God's eternally begotten Son "from above." The "above" is what He was referring to as belonging to "heavenly things." That would have been too, too much for Nicodemus to handle.

So let's have no more of this teaching that we were CREATED as spiritual beings. NO! We were birthed as spiritual beings, and made to be creatures out of our birthed substance. That's why "...the earnest expectation of the CREATURE waiteth for the manifestation of the SONS of God. All creation, including our own, awaits the uncovering of our sonship (our BIRTHED being), for creation came from sonship, and as the sons of God go, so goes all creation. "....the CREATURE itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption INTO the glorious liberty of the CHILDREN of God." Our creaturehood will be restored to its Origin, the origin of being God's bairn, His BIRTHED ones, His kin, His offspring---in the Greek, His "genos," His very kind of Being.

Jesus could not have been more specific about His relationship to God. He knew Himself as BEGOTTEN of God as His Father. He knew that He was begotten before taking on creaturehood, but since His own creaturely humanity came from God-birthed substance, when He arose from the dead, the whole of His humanity came forth in resurrection to be glorified.

Did you get that? There was no body left in the tomb. In the whole of His fully formed, bodily humanity, He received back the glory which He had with the Father before the world began. And now, He is the One MAN, Christ Jesus, who is our mediator between God and man, the One by whom we receive His own glorified Humanity by His indwelling Spirit. How is it, then, that there is a teaching abroad of grandiose insistence, dogmatically declaring that we need to realize that we are not human? It is claimed that we must get beyond such a gross misunderstanding in order to know our true identity. How did such a situation come to be? How does one not see that such teaching essentially creates a concept that separates the Son of God from the Son of Man, in the face of the truth that our Lord's Manhood had His Sonship as its origin. I wonder what would be the response of Jesus, should we tell Him, "I'm so glad to have come to the deep understanding that, like You, I'm not really a human being?" Might our Lord's answer be: "Do you know something that my dear servant, Peter, did not know, when with the anointing from my Father, he declared, 'Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a MAN (emphasis mine) approved among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know.' Are you claiming a revelation superior to his?"

Identity: From Heaven to Earth, Part Two: Deity Descending

The human condition has been described as being the result of "having been lowered into this gross, material world." I remember reading that statement, and immediately thinking, "There are folk who will infer misleading connotations from this." We must never infer from that thesis that materiality is essentially gross (repulsive/disgusting/of inferior constitution). God saw His creation as good, and upon crowning His work by creating man, He saw that it was very good. Pardon my English, but there is a principle that out from within its own goodness, goodness becomes gooder. Though vulnerable to mis-inference, the thesis is a good one, worthy of reflection, for it helps remind us of that our being is essentially eternal, and the present condition to which we have been subjected veils our true identity. Goodness, even goodness at its very good stage, can have imposed upon it that which is gross without losing its essential goodness.

The administration of God does surely involve a lowering, a descent. Thank God for that. Jesus is He who both descended and ascended AS the Son of Man. All humanity was present in Him in His descent and ascent and the whole process of descent and ascent served to make the good gooder. I have referred to the truth many times, that in the incarnation, God did not cease to be God by becoming man and in the ascension, man did not cease to be man by His glorification. Let's consider that further: Where did the humanity come from by which God became a man in the incarnation of His Son? Was that humanity added to Jesus Christ as something unrelated to God ontologically? That's the prevailing theological notion. But it's desperately wrong. The humanity that Deity became in the incarnation of Christ, came out from the very core of Godness. Most certainly, the incarnation, as all things pertaining to the administration of God, is from the inside out.

The incarnation within time and space, drew from the embodiment of all the fullness of Deity in eternity. As it was in heaven, so it became on earth. What was added to our earthenness was the element of becoming alienated. Out from within the inmost of God, and through the inmost of God, and into the inmost of God is our being, Our space-time-material existence causes a tear between who we are, and who we perceive ourselves to be – and we live out our perception. Does that mean that time and space and materiality (I'll leave it up to Einstein to explain the relationship among the three) are essentially evil? No, it means that God's goodness is SO good that God chooses, in His solidarity with us, to suffer alienation so that the "very good" might come forth out of the good. "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it MORE ABUNDANTLY." Where does life more abundant come from? It comes from life's inherent abundance released through death.

The further down into hades that Jesus descended, the greater the heights became into which He ascended. To quote brother J. Preston Eby: "God projected Himself, out of Himself, so that He might be Himself in another dimension, and He did this by His Word." He went from being ALL in eternity, to undergoing a process of becoming all in all within time. During that process He remained the eternal God. But in the process of becoming all in the ages, out from being eternity's All-ness, even God suffered estrangement from Himself, which estrangement, we suffered in and with Him. This is at the heart of the passion of Christ.

From eternity's side of the situation there is no estrangement, but from this side we suffer from being away from Home. This is our travail: to birth, out from within our present incarnation, the freedom that is intrinsic to our true humanness, the true humanness displayed in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. BY the struggle to be free of its cocoon imprisonment, the life within the worm is called upon to release the worm's intrinsic and beautiful wings to become a creature of flight. We started, from eternity, AS lovely butterflies who are destined to become even more beautiful and to gain a capacity of flight not hitherto known in our experience.

This indeed does beg the question, just what is evil? What is the nature of evil? Is it not most essentially this estrangement that issues forth in the enmity at being thus inflicted? But if so, where did it come from? There was nothing but pure goodness before the above administration was set in motion. Nothing but goodness – the goodness of the God who is love. Can Perfect Goodness find within Itself the wherewithall to bring alienation into existence? For a moment, let's set aside just HOW God could do such a thing, and ponder more importantly, WHY. If this was done by Love, it was done with love's purpose in view. Something of such a magnificence of glory must be where God is going "through it all," taking us with Him. That magnificence of glory must have required the element of "the suffering of this present time" to be without comparison, but very, very relevant.

All we can conclude is that Love found it within Itself to---WHILE staying Home, and maintaining that Home---nevertheless, send Himself to a strange country. Imagine the suffering of a God who is His own communal Home, creating a dimension within which, He has become a stranger to Himself. There's a hymn that speaks of love finding a way: "Love found a way, to redeem my soul. Love found a way, that could make me whole. Love sent my Lord, to the cross of shame. Love found a way, oh bless His holy name." Well, Love found a way, which we cannot fathom, by which He will be increasingly and ongoingly more glorious in His love throughout all eternity.