The Gift of Himself
By John Gavazzoni

As scripture informs us, "(God) gives life and breath to all things." All nature exists, lives, and is sustained, by life FROM God. But that dimension of life-giving falls short of God's gift of Himself for the purpose of personal fellowship. As Spirit, God extends His life to create that which has the capacity-potential for communion, but capacity-potential for communion is not itself communion. As an aside, let it be remembered that the underbelly of the potential for fellowship with God, is the potential for alienation from God. When God goes beyond giving life FROM Himself, to giving Himself, i.e., His very Person, as communing life, the potential is realized, but when God withholds Himself as communing life, inevitably the potential for alienation, which is death itself, occurs. Instead of the life which IS communion with God, we descend into the death, which IS ignorance of God as He truly is.

The capacity for fellowship with God has within itself the glorious hope of fulfillment, but until the fulfillment comes, the capacity becomes a source of intuitive feelings of yearning frustration and futility. With any capacity, any potential, until potential yields fulfillment, the sense that something's not right becomes a terrible itch that can't be scratched. We must have "it" but we're denied "it." The "it," of course, is Him, God Himself hidden from us within us, waiting for the time of the Father's determination to come into us, from within us, to share with us the communing life of the God-family Itself. But the days, weeks, months, and years may drag on as we're denied that revelation, and drag on even beyond this life. All human addiction; all human obsessive-compulsive, clinging attachment, by the way, is at its heart a substitute for Him gifting Himself to us, including His communion with the Father.

God's gift of Himself in His Son began as a gift to the world, but according to God's design, the world cannot come to know that gift except by His ordered, open-ended, sequential election. Hence, all creation is anxiously waiting for the revealing of the sons of God. Until Adam and all his progeny have the Son-basis of their creaturehood revealed to them from within them - each in his own order, sequentially and open-endedly by divine election - all creation will suffer the futility of its unrealized potential. No natural potential has the ability for self-fulfillment. It must be acted upon by grace and grace alone.

Divine election will continue open-endedly, choosing out sequentially from the world's system those few chosen to proclaim the election of the many. God's design has been to lead us into helplessness, before leading us into glory. There's a most insightful expression in an old hymn: "Chords that were broken will vibrate once more." Inevitably by God's temporary withholding of Himself from us, the chords that could sing the praises of our God became broken, but they will sing again. They most surely will sing again. They will sing in the eons as they have always sung in eternity, building to that crescendo that will bring the eons to their goal: that God might be all in all.

Divine election will continue with sequential open-endedness until it is proved that the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. The original gifting and calling of God belong to none other than Adam, and all who have come, and will come, from his loins. "Be fruitful, multiply, replenish the earth, and conquer it," was/is God's gift to, and calling of, Adam. Within the depths of the truth that the first Adam has found his destiny in and as the Last Adam (there being a continuity of the first to the Last as only one essential humanity), it has been a source of wonderment to me, that we entered the timelessness of God's eternality ----yet paradoxically, from within the same---out from the womb of God, while God entered time and space from within the womb of a woman whose humanity, of course, came from that first man. God gave birth to man, and man gave birth to God. This seems to be at the heart of Paul's description of the growth of the body of Christ, which reads literally in the Greek as "the body increases the increase of God."