Heavenly Mindedness (76)

 

Continuing from our last post, 2 Peter 1:3 – 4:

 

“…seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.”

 

When we come into a relationship with Jesus Christ we are new creations, new creatures, we have a new nature, and that nature is the nature of God, for we are birthed by the Holy Spirit as His sons and daughters, as the author of Hebrews styles this, “both He [Jesus] who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from one [Father]; for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren” (Heb. 2:11).

 

“The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:16). “See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God…” (1 John 3:1).

 

In 2 Peter 1:4, Peter tells us that as the Word of God works in us, and as we respond to this working, as the promises of God operate within us, that we partake of the Divine Nature, we commune with it, we experience koinonia with the Trinity.

 

There is much mystery surrounding all of this, and sadly people tend to go one of two ways with this mystery; they either become self-focused and arrogant and forget that no matter how grand the promises of God are to us, that God is still God and that we ain’t God. The promises are grand and glorious because they are God’s promises, and they will always be God’s promises, and in the infiniteness of eternity, in the depths of eternity, God will remain the great I AM and we, as glorious as we shall be in Jesus Christ, will always be His sons and daughters; we will never be the Alpha and Omega, we will never be the I AM, we will never be the Creator…we will always “be” in Him, His glorious Nature will always “be” in us, indeed it will be ours (if we can speak in such language) – but let us not be fools, the glory of the New Jerusalem is centered in the glory of God and of the Lamb.

 

The other sad response is that we simply refuse to believe what the Bible clearly teaches, that we are partakers of the Divine Nature, that we are no longer sinners but are now saints, and that we are called to live as the sons and daughters of the Living God right here and right now. We may preach about being born again but we don’t really believe it, not as a way of life. We are called to life in the Trinity but we much prefer to live in the Old Covenant – this is a tragic irony; preaching the new birth on one hand, and then refusing to believe that it really happened by inculcating a “sinner” mentality on the other hand. We bind the Word of God in one another (writing in human terms).

 

Well, what I’d like us to see is that we are born again by the Word (1 Peter 1:23); that we are continually and expansively saved by the Word (James 1:18 & 21); and that we are made partakers of the Divine Nature by the Word (2 Peter 1:3 – 4). This brings us to Hebrews 4:12 – 13, where we see that the Word works within us to give us rest, to convict us, to cleanse us, and to progressively transform us into the image of Jesus Christ as we seek Him, our Great High Priest.

 

“For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.” Hebrews 4:12 – 13.

 

We cannot really know ourselves, we can only know what God reveals to us about ourselves. This knowledge can come through common grace as well as special grace given to us via the Word of God made alive by the Holy Spirit. The man or woman who embarks on an expedition to search the depths of his or her own heart may make some legitimate but limited discoveries, and will likely encounter both despair and self-deception, but we really don’t have the capacity to consistently discern the difference between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and to make sound judgments about the thoughts and intents of our hearts.

 

We must place ourselves in the hands of the Great Physician, trusting Him to convict us, encourage us, and reveal to us what we need to see, when we need to see it – both with respect to ourselves and with respect to His unfolding transformative glory in our lives.

 

At one and the same time we are partaking of the Divine Nature through the Word of God (2 Peter 1:3 – 4) while that same Word is working deep within our beings to convict, convince, and lay us bare before God and our Great High Priest. This Divine dynamic is complementary and bears witness to the incredible love that our Father has toward us, the same love with which He loves the Firstborn Son (John 17:23).

 

Here is a gentle observation; we may note that in Ephesians 6:17 that the Word of God is styled “the sword of the Spirit.” That is a powerful image, an image that we see in Revelation 1:16; 2:12, 16; 19:15. I have often heard Christians refer to their Bibles as swords. I have been in Christian meetings in which we’ve been told to lift our “swords” up so everyone can see them. What I want to say is that this sword is not ours to manipulate, nor to treat as some sort of spiritual power or weapon at our beck and call; rather, this sword calls us to submit to it and only the man or woman who submits to this sword can learn to wield it with the Wisdom of God. Otherwise, we more often than not resemble children playing some sort of war game.

 

The woman or man who would learn Ephesians 6:17 would do well to first learn the ways of the Word in Hebrews 4:12 – 13; for, among other things, it is good for us to engage with the “sword of the Spirit” in the spirit and not in the soul – much in the professing church in done in the soul, hence much in the professing church carries the hand of man and not the hand of God. (Note Paul’s treatment of the spiritual man and the soulical man in 1 Corinthians Chapter 2, and of carnal Christians in Chapter 3).

 

What role do verses 12 and 13 play in Hebrews Chapter 4?

 

We’ll look at this in the next post in this series.