I AM HE IS
By John Gavazzoni

With God identifying Himself to us as I AM, we might turn to one another in verbal agreement that HE IS. HE IS affirms I AM. If we were to reply to God's self-identity, it would be accurate to say in agreement, YOU ARE. The I AM of God encompasses all existence: "for in Him we live, and move, and have our being." There is a distinction there: there's Him, and there's we (please don't forget that), but the we has its source from the "stuff" of Him, exists within Him, Has no life except the life that comes from Him, and is sustained by, and has its coherence from, Him.

The I AM; the HE IS, is the dimension OF God, and dimension which IS God. Yet He created another dimension within Himself, to which was added "was and is to come," to "is." It is a dimension to which He has granted His presence out from within the larger dimension of His I AM, but that lesser inner circle-dimension does not define God. Viewing this as two concentric circles, the (much) smaller within the larger one, the Being which is the larger circle, has joined all the beings within the smaller circle, within which they together have commenced a journey that involves "was and is to come," in contrast to "is," but at the end i.e., the end-goal (Greek: telos for goal) of that journey the separation between the two circles will disappear, and the I AM-dimension of Him, will become to all things, that which HE IS. Paul wrote of that as God becoming All in all. Note that concerning "all" there are two: All in all. There is a distinction between the source of a thing, and the thing, though the thing exists by the essence of its source.

Ed Browne has creatively called the above, the Godyssey. Strange indeed it seems to us that the inner circle should,by God's design, be afflicted by nothing less than full-blown enmity toward its outer circle-Source, while the Source suffers the indignity of such infamy without any of like kind retaliation. But as strange as it may seem to the natural mentality, that design originated from glorious wisdom. The wisdom of God never shone more brightly than when He decided to become a two-dimensional God. He is the larger dimension, yet lives in union with the smaller dimension. It is the height of vain futility to attempt to understand such wisdom, i.e., to look for it as an object to be gained. It is only given by grace. It is given, not in any way as a response to our efforts to understand, but within the giving of Himself to us. Having Him, in intimate communion with Him, we understand as He understands.

It's the wisdom that had a central place for a cross, for God to suffer with us the very antithesis of Himself as "the living God." It's the wisdom of perfect love: