Understanding Godness
for Dummies
By John Gavazzoni

Please don't be offended by me having a little fun with the title of this article. I'm not at all implying that my readers are "dummies." I'm just using a contemporary rhetorical device to get your attention, and emphasize how profoundly simple, and simply profound, is the relational dynamic within Godness---conventionally translated as "Godhead." If I was conducting a class the assigned reading would be the 17th chapter of the Gospel of John, to be read several times, meditated over, and spiritually chewed slowly and thoroughly in preparation for such digestion that will be spiritually health-building.

Keep in mind as you read, that the Holy Spirit has graciously recorded, and seen to the preservation of, Jesus' most intimate pourings out of His heart to His---and in union with Him, our---Father God, and that He faces what the writer of Hebrews records as, "so great a death." In that seventeenth chapter, there is no element of Jesus speaking in a way that includes making any concession to a listener's ignorance and/or interpreting the Lord's words within a false or faulty religious paradigm.

The record provides for us an entrance into the inner sanctum of raw, to the point, Deity with Deity communion as God's Son pours out His heart before His Father on behalf of those whom the Father had drawn to Him out of this world, and for those who would be drawn in the future because of their witness. It is clear that our Lord has in view "that the whole world may know that You have sent me," and "that the whole world may believe that Thou hast sent me."

Our Lord's prayer combined requests with affirmation, basing His requests affirmatively upon the sure Rock of the dynamic that constituted their relationship, i.e., "faith that worketh by love." That's what is so evident, simply and profoundly. What one finds pervasive in that hour of the holiest of communion is the faith of Christ founded upon the love of the Father. Jesus is fully persuaded of the Father's love, which love within Him returns to the Father as persuaded conviction, confident assurance, and finally absolute trust.

What's on my heart to say in this article, is that THAT'S exactly what salvation is all about: being granted by pure, free, grace a participation in the dynamic, so passionately prayed and eternally settled within the ages in that Garden of Gethsemane, which binds Godness together with that to which all mankind is called, and which is at the heart of "the mark of the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus."

There is perfect faith born of perfect love which, in the one, Human experience of Christ for us all, was settled in the Garden of Gethsemane. The perfection and goal of this became the existential destiny of all mankind as we share in His Person and Human experience - all the way from, "If it be possible, Father, let this cup pass from me, but nevertheless, not My will, but Thine be done," on to the cross with that capstone of perfect faith-utterance, "Father, into Thy hands I commit My spirit."

There is a surety in the worst of what life lays upon us. It is the surety of love that will not let us go, of love that stays with us through the deepest of life's miseries, even when we're denied the consciousness of Its abiding presence, even as we cry, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" Death could not hold Him, and it will not hold us, for no other reason than THAT love. Lost your faith? Just wait, THAT love will bring you through from the utter sense of lonely abandonment to that assurance of faith that our very spirit is safe in the arms of such love, even in the face of "so great a death."