The Fruit of His Loins
and
the Work of His Hands
By John Gavazzoni
.
There is a place for reading scripture allegorically, i.e., with things and/or people symbolizing something or someone beyond themselves, and for reading it literally, i.e., the thing and/or person is what it is. Reading all of scripture exclusively in one way or the other of these would lead one to either, on one hand, dismissing historical factuality as relevant at all, or on the other hand, missing out on the richness of how the historically factual can have within it, as a seed, the promise of the unfolding of the nature and administration of God. The Apostle Paul combined the two perfectly in his understanding of what needed to be seen in the story of the relationship of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac, in contrast to Abraham, Hagar, and Ishmael. He saw the allegorical factor within physical, historical, relationships.
Reading scripture only in the literal mode of interpretation has often produced conclusions re: God's relationship with man that are nothing less than heinous. Reading scripture only in the allegorical mode of interpretation, on the other hand, has led to flights of theological fancy that, in effect, make all of human history a mere illusion. If seen through eyes of inspiration, probably everything historical can have within it an allegorical factor that most essentially leads us to understand the nature and ways of God. God, out from the timelessness of His Being, expresses Himself in space and time, materially and quite uniquely in human physicality.
Men have loins, and from their loins proceeds a process of reproduction. Men have hands, by which they create, form, carve out, construct, and give physical form to the marvelous things they can imagine. This physical actuality has an allegorical connection to a reality within God. There is in God a Primal Factor expressed in the existence of human loins and hands: God is our Father, and our Creator. He, the one God, is both. Gnosticism can't handle that. For them, if we posit spiritual things coming from God as Father, physical, material things, must come from another god...historically in Gnostic thought, a demigod.
Since God is our Father and Creator....understanding the distinction that lies in that combination of relationship.... from Him, His children, each of us, lives a life, has an existence, on one plane, while as His creatures, each of us lives a life, has an existence, on another plane. The two are wonderfully joined, but also distinctly unique. The former is Primal, the latter is derived from the former. I have come to the conviction that a literal interpretation is important when reading the several places in scripture that speak of our origin as children of God, and that the Spirit of inspiration is careful to add (and it would seem redundantly for emphasis) that we are begotten of God. In the case of our Lord Jesus, John informs us that He is God's Son as uniquely, only, singly begotten.
That is, while there is the only-begotten of the Father, yet also many sons, it is by His sonship that we are all the sons/children of God. As I have put it may times, we are sons in THE SON, and it is THE SON in each of the sons that makes the sons sons. Another way of saying it is, that there is only one sonship that we all share, having its source in the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. On the plane of divine sonship, there exists no corruption, because there is no corruptibility on that plane. That which is born of God continually cannot sin, for his Seed lies within him. That Seed is incorruptible. Peter writes that we are born of the incorruptible Seed. From an incorruptible Seed, comes incorruptible children.
But while that plane remains undisturbed in any way, that is, we all continue to live a life as children of the incorruptible Seed, as the fruit of His loins, and we cannot be removed from that plane and that relationship, yet inexplicably as creatures, as the work of His hands, we have been sent into a strange land (yet never really leaving home) to live a life of corruptibility...to, as it were, experience all that we are not, in order to become all that we are, in order that the Seed of our Being in God, in Christ, might bloom to its fullest glory.
A kind of separation was needed that begged reunion, so that in the reunion the full passion of love's glory is released. It is an inescapable truth that in God, there exists both potential and the realization of potential, and it seems that contrariety becomes the catalyst for the full realization of the divine potential. God becomes all that He is out of the depths of all that He is, by facing all that He is not. We are integral to that process. Any explanation of that mystery falls short, for eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for those who love Him. (And I must hasten to add, we all will love Him, because we love Him because He first loved us, and He loves all of us.) I repeat: since we love God because He first loved us, and He loves us all, therefore His love "be" the cause of all of us loving Him.
We all will come back home to that plane of incorruptible, immortal sonship, the better for having, as pilgrims and sojourners, traveled in and completely through, the strange land which is the plane of our creaturehood, where we become all that we are not in order to fully realize all that we are. The greater plane will overcome the lesser, and death will be swallowed up in that victory. One plane is the plane of life, the other of death. They are, at the same time opposed, yet also complementary. We will experience fully what Jesus meant when He said, "I am come that they might have life, AND THAT more abundantly." So keep in mind as you walk through this vale of tears, you are "the fruit of His loins and the work of His hands."
