Jesus Our Victor!
The Bible is clear in numerous passages that, before God said, “Let there be light” - before the foundation of the world - the Father had declared a defiant “No!” to the wayward decisions of Adam and humanity and, motivated by His eternal and unrelenting love, determined to ‘set aright’ the invasion of sin’s destructive delusions into the soul of humankind. Personally. Intimately. Completely. His eternal plan always included His ‘humble condescension’ - the incarnation of His divine presence in bodily form - His active participation in human life, co-joining His divinity with our humanity, forever in union with His Creation.
Jesus is the living guarantee of God’s love; our assurance of His unbroken Presence for all eternity
Yet this action did not come without risk.
Jesus entered into Adamic flesh. Fully.
Not in some kind of exercise of ‘arm’s length’ observation or objective empathy. He really participated in our human experience. He saw what Adam saw. He felt what Adam’s psycho-neuro conditioning was habituating in His lived existence. This means, He felt the fear of being human. He felt the separation and alienation of the Adamic delusion. He felt the temptation to ‘go it alone.’ To not trust the Father. To treat The Father’s will with suspicion and distance. He was tempted in all points as we are; yet without sin. He stood in the midst of our delusion and said, “No!”
Jesus said to the lie of sin, “this is not the truth about who you were created to be, and it’s not the truth about who my Father is.”
Yet this was the risk
If the Son of God fails to fully entered our existence, then He fails to fully connect His fellowship, in the circle of Triune love, with our humanity. Additionally, if He fails to live out His Triune relationship from within fallen Adamic existence, He fails to defeat the power of the ‘god of this world’ from the inside out, as the Son of Man - and therefore lead all of humanity out of its hopeless bondage.
We could not do it.
But He could not fail.
And the temptation to take a different course of action had to be real, not contrived or staged. The decisions of the Son of Man to succeed where Adam had failed, to choose LIFE rather than Good and Evil, to surrender when selfish action and reaction was actually the preferred option, had to truly hang on a knife edge each and every time. Otherwise…His temptation would be insincere. His alignment with humanity and its entrenched systems of anti-God, anti-Kingdom values would only be lip service at best. The victory we needed had to be accomplished by God, in total union with humankind, as our Second Adam.
The adoption of humankind into the unbroken fellowship of Trinitarian life, involved the risking of the very being of God, in the incarnation and obedience to death of His very own Self.
Either:
1. There would be an unthinkable conversion in the being and character of God - the separation of the Son from His Father and Spirit, lost in the same delusion as humankind;
2. Or…there would be a fundamental restructuring in the being and character of Adam.
In Jesus’ victory - Adamic existence is rebirthed and recreated into fellowship with God once again. Jesus’ entire life on earth was a step by step, moment by moment, decision after decision, blow by blow ‘hammering out’ of sonship, from within fallen Adamic existence, on the anvil of Adam’s fallen psycho-neuro predispositions and delusions. At each step, Jesus refused to be like Adam. Jesus refused to be like Israel. Jesus bent back every bit of wrongheadedness within the Adamic mind. His suffering was more than the cross. His whole incarnation, life, death, and triumphant resurrection was a perpetual cross. His resurrected existence, even today, continues to be His cross. His Cross was and continues to be ‘the Uncreated Eternal Word,’ transformed forever, fully God and fully Man: in perpetuity. An eternally transformed ‘way of being’ as a result of His loving faithfulness to His creation.
His throne is His cross. The crowns He has given us, we will give back to Him, throwing them at His feet (Rev.4). Our lives are His glory. His life is our glory. Dying on the cross was Jesus’ final and decisive refusal to be Adam and live in Adams world of separation and alienation. He never leaves the Fathers embrace and surrenders to death, all the while clinging by faith to His otherworldly power source of Spirit and Truth that will consume the curse of death over humanity and seize the keys of hell and death from Satan himself.
Jesus will prove that true Sonship will never be defeated. Sonship was always our original human design and ultimate destiny. Sonship is the ULTIMATE truth that could ever be uttered about humanity. Sonship was always the answer to Adams question of trust in the living God. But Sonship looked like something, felt like something, acted like something, loved like something: and we couldn’t see it anymore. Jesus had to find us, redeem us - then show us the blueprint again.
It looked like Him. Fully surrendered, abandoned, oneness and union with the Father. A stance we were originally designed for - that would fill human life with life, and life more abundant. It was from this place of power that Jesus overcame our enemies. It is back into His example that, as we abide in Him and allow His words to abide in us, we too will experience the living reality of HIS sonship with the Father, and defeat the enemies of our soul. What Jesus has objectively defeated forever and eternally FOR US…is subjectively defeated BY US, when we stand in His place of TRUTH. Sonship and daughtership; the place of truth (ORIGINAL DESIGN), that produces the life of God and the victory of God within us, always overcomes sin and death in our human experience. As we enter His life, we overcome.
