The Fullest Meaning of
Christ's Indwelling
By John Gavazzoni

We have moments when we're granted revelation-insights that spiritually and theologically inform us for a lifetime. So it was for me many years ago as I was drawn into reflecting on what I was to understand re: what God had indeed given to us in the indwelling of Christ for especially believers now, but also as the promised ultimate blessing for all humanity. The indwelling of Christ is God's ultimate blessing in that by such intimacy, Christ brings us to know His and our Father.

I think most Christians who have some concept of being indwelt by Christ, or at least give lip service to that truth, think of the "vessel" (us) and Christ as sort of like the difference between, for instance, a glass bottle containing a liquid: Two different things; the vessel of containment and its contents.

But I've come to believe that the vessel and its contents are of one and the same essence. In terms of the incarnation, which must be the basis for understanding Christ's indwelling, it seems to me that God, becoming human, in the Person of His Son, should not be thought of as something alien or even in some way inconsistent with His eternal Personhood.

To think of there being any kind of fundamental inconsistency of natures raises for me all kinds of theological difficulties. If "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" is a reference point for good theology in respect to the nature of Christ and the eonian workings of God, then that is the standard of the economy of God.

God became on earth, in the eons, in the space-time continuum, exactly what He is in heaven. Nothing essential changed, only the form, as in Adam created according to the likeness of God being FORMED out of the wet soil of the ground. Essential Spirit was, might we say, compacted into eonian form, so that while there was no change of essence, essence was made to suffer a disconnect from its Primal Origin (Barth).

My aforementioned epiphany was the result of the Spirit of Truth fixing my attention on the relationship of humanness and Deity as, in shadow and type, pictured by the structural arrangement of the Ark of the Covenant. Suddenly my attention became focused on the description of the Ark as made of wood overlaid with gold.

Wood, being a type of humanity, and gold, a type of Deity, usually we would think of the gold being inside the wood, but it's the opposite with the Ark. I saw from this that what we know as humanness in this life, this dimension, has always been within Deity: the wood inside the gold overlay.

Just what is humanness when considered in its eternal/timeless existence? It is, I believe, that hidden radiance of glory waiting to be unveiled. With man being called by Paul, the image and glory of God, and Jesus being the express image of the invisible God, and by the writer of Hebrews, the express image of the Divine, the radiance or effulgence of God's glory, Godness is completely unveiled; it has come fully forth in the True Humanness of/which is, Christ, and we in union with Him.

Jesus seemed to make some difference between (Zoe)-Life, and "that more abundantly." So it seems that God draws forth out of His life -resplendent with glory-a greater, more abundance of itself/Himself, as is seen in the story of Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well.

Noting particularly that it was to a Samaritan-in that day, a people despised by Jews as a counterfeit of God's chosen people-our Lord promised, "The water that I shall give you shall be in you a well of water springing up into eonian life." The water becomes a well, indicating that God's life is not static. I have written in this regard that "God becomes more and more of all that He is out from the depths of all that He is." (That statement needs to be read carefully, for God needs nothing outside of Himself in order to be an increasing God who gives increase out from the increase of Himself.)

In that regard, both Jonathan Mitchell and Eddie Browne, both devoted students of New Testament Greek, have included in their translation of the passage about the church growing by a growth from God (in Col. 2:19), that in the more literal translation of "increases with the increase of God," as the KJV has it, it really reads, that the church "goes on growing and increasing God's growth (or: the growth of God)."

Note, it is God's increase, of course, in union with the church, Christ's body. So, returning to my initial positing, Christ is not in us merely as a liquid is in a glass bottle, for instance; He is in us in the sense of constituting our very true humanness. He is in us as ontologically pervasive. The "vessel" dimension of that relationship has been given over to suffer alienation from its heavenly origin, a condition integral to creaturehood itself taught by Paul in his statement about all creation being subjected to futility, not of its own will, but by the will of Him who subjected it.

The One who indwells us did not have humanness added to His Deity in His incarnation, as is generally and traditionally understood. Rather God sent His beloved Son into the world, and from right here with us, into our hearts as the life-giving Spirit, having the totality of all mankind's True Humanness within the Deity He shares with the Father.

What a plan; what a Man: Magnificent!

Part Two

Jesus Christ, God's Son, our Lord and Savior, is presented in the Gospel of John as having been sent into the world, and in the Epistle to the Romans, as the Spirit of God's Son sent into our hearts. That distinction is worth considering, in that by the former we properly infer that God's Son is God's gift to nothing less than the world, as the Savior of the world, and by the latter, that He saves the world in the most intimate way by gaining entrance into the hearts of all mankind.

He has, from the beginning of creation been immanent even to being its constituent Spirit, while also, encompassing the whole as the One "in whom all things were created," and "in whom all things cohere." He is creation's Beginning, it's Continuance, and its Destiny. That very One in whom all things were created, came into the whole that was created within Him, as the Man, Christ Jesus. It begs repeating: The whole was within Him, yet He came into the whole.

When He came among us, He still had us all within Him. That hadn't changed. Now, with all of us in Him, in union with Him, His all-inclusive experience became our experience. The whole of the human condition underwent renewal by His death, burial, resurrection AND glorification. It was renewal all the way to glorification.

We have been nothing less than glorified with Him. That has always been the plan of God, the glorification of all mankind through the perfecting experience of the One who is the True Human. That True Humanity, is our Humanity. As I have written elsewhere, it was necessary for us to endure in the eons all that we are not, in order to become all that we truly are. He bore it all for us. In Him it's been done. As Jonathan Mitchell's translation has it, He died "over us," and "over our sin." We might say, He's got us covered.

Now we can appreciate the truth that Christ, as Man, is our Mediator: "There is one mediator between God and man, the MAN, Christ Jesus." (my emphasis) He mediates to us, the New Humanity that He is seminally, inclusive of us in union with Him. Creation is not "creation ex nihilo," (creation out of nothing) as is conventionally misunderstood.

Rather, God gave of His own very Spirit-substance via His Son, out of which He created/formed the universe, without, of course, losing anything of Himself in the process since His Spirit, the Spirit which He is, is infinite. Infinity cannot be diminished by the sharing of Itself/Himself.

Then there is the matter of what I tried to make clear, that-contrary to conventional theology-therefore, as per above, humanness was not added to Deity in the incarnation. What we know to be human, has always been within, integral to, and intrinsic to Deity, though we, in the time-dimension, experience it in its subjection to vanity/futility. In the incarnation, that Humanness came to us, no longer hidden, but in full display (bodily, I must say) in Christ.

A careful study of glory throughout the Bible reveals that it is that dimension of the Godhead that we know in time, as human, that is the glory-element of Deity doctrinally established by Paul referring to man as the image and glory of God.

I hasten to say that "man" there is used by Paul generically inclusive of its feminine aspect. In fact, the final display of God's glory is seen in Revelation in its feminine form: "I beheld the New Jerusalem descending out of heaven as a bride adorned for her husband." With that statement belongs also that that habitation of God is described as "having the glory of God."

Paul gave a beautiful teaching about Christ being the glory of God, and the man being the glory of Christ, and the woman being the glory of the man. He begins with God, then to Christ, then to the man, and finally to the woman. Hence when glory fully comes forth, It comes forth in feminine beauty and grace.

The woman, in the cultural model of Paul's day, humbly and (we might say) demurely, would cover her head to indicate that the glory is not something of herself, so she defers attention away from herself to the Source of the glory. From this, we remember that we are the body of Christ, and the bride of Christ. Therefore, to our Head, and to our Beloved, belongs the glory.