Completion From Completeness
By John Gavazzoni

One will not go very far into a serious study of the message of the New Testament without facing what presents itself to the natural mind as a disturbing contradiction. On one hand we have the line of teaching, found mostly, but not exclusively, in Paul's epistles, describing and heralding such a union of the believer with his Lord Jesus Christ, by which state, "where" He is, so also is he... right now, without reservation or qualification. Paul clearly teaches that the Father, having raised Jesus from the dead, has in Him, raised us up also to sit together with Christ at the right hand of the Majesty on High: A done deal. He has raised us up TOGETHER with Him (that is, any individual application must be understood within the collective.) "There" with Him (the "there" being not a place measurable and/or locatable in physical terms within the created cosmos, but as a state of relational being).

On the other hand, we have that line of teaching in the same New Testament that presents completion as progressing continually toward a goal. Broadly speaking, it's the message of hope, of expectancy, i.e., completion as an existential/experiential process, at work now and continuing on to consummation. Face it, dear fellow student of scripture, we have set before us the seemingly paradoxical mix of a completeness accomplished in the past for us in Christ, but also a completion yet to be realized fully. It is not as some have taught, in order to try to resolve this seeming conundrum, that God sees our future perfection by God's grace, and so speaks of it as already done. No, that misses something very dear, and I must say, magnificent about our Lord Jesus, and our union with Him. Such a view is offered as a theological paradigm to relieve the intellectual tension of the above two lines of New Testament teaching.

I offer, to the reader, a better model, I believe, in all humility, for I could not have conceived it by any intellectual powers of my own. This model has as its foundation the magnificently inclusive magnitude of the Person of Jesus Christ. Let me explain: Our Lord Jesus is presented in scripture as including in Himself, first and foremost, the fullness of the Godhead bodily. In a word, He is all that God is, and that, especially, bodily, in existential Humanness. He, as the Son, possesses the same fullness of Deity as does His Father. But He is also presented as including in Himself the whole of created humanity, for all things were created, not merely "by Him," but "in Him." If there is any reason to speak of God creating all things BY Him, it is so, by Him, IN Him. As it was given to me by the Spirit to deeply reflect upon, and wonderfully appreciate, God's Son, the Christ, is in His Person, The Containment Field of all things, and most importantly of all mankind.

Let's continue upon and within that model: God's Son, sharing fully the Deity of His Father by a purity of timeless reproduction with nothing of a previous ancestry, of course, being included (as opposed to we, whose genetic mix goes back before our fathers and mothers to whatever mix of grand parentage made us physically who/what we are), the Son of God's ancestry is of pure Deity parentage, a parentage begetting, but in Itself, unbegotten. Thus...also as it has been given me to understand...Deity is to Itself a Son as a Father, and a Father to Itself as a Son. And/or by eternally (by that I mean, timelessly/beyond time) begetting a Son, God became a Father, such is the non-static relational perfection of God.

Therefore, being in Himself the fullness of the Godhead (or Godness) with that Divine fullness dwelling in Him, as in taking up abode within Him, and in Himself, summing up the whole body of humanity, when that "Cosmic Christ," came into the world as one Man, He came into the world with all things (still) in Him seminally. Cosmic Reality had taken the form of the Man, Christ Jesus, the Mediator between God and men. What was true and real of Him before His incarnation, remained true and real within Himself as the One True God/Man. To rephrase: the One in whom all things were created, came into that whole, with the whole in Him in Seed form. We might say that, as such, He constituted the DNA of all things. When He, completed His human experience culminating in His glorification and enthronement at the right hand of God, in Seed-form, the whole of creation, reached the eschaton, the final, the end, of all that God purposed for His creation.

Now, by His indwelling, that seminal absolute-without-qualification completeness, is unfolding in us as existential completion. It is completION out of completeNESS. The former constitutes the latter. The imperative is that we must go on to completion, but based upon the indicative of our completeness in Him, the Seed of our destiny. This is what we might say Paul hinted at when He wrote of desiring that the believer would know the breadth, length, height, and depth of Christ (that is), the wonderful dimensions of the inclusivity of His love, for the above plan was borne in the fires of the Love of God.

While the emphasis of Christ's real indwelling of the believer is so very needed and called-for, what we need to understand is that Christ in us is based upon us in Christ. The latter is the foundation of the former. Coming to understand all that is in Him, leads us to a greater edifying understanding of His magnitude in us. He who is The Containment Field of all things, is the one who is our life, May it be given to you to bask in the sunshine of that understanding. Be awed. Be (truly) raptured by such wonder.