“Seed, who is Christ.” (Gal. 3:16, NKJV)
We ended the previous teaching with a cliffhanger, in the style of a dramatic soap. Allow us to briefly again present the most important insights regarding seed, “who is Christ” (Gal 3:16), that we discussed in the previous teaching:
- The “life of Jesus” is planted within you as a spiritual seed, when you are born again, “that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body” (2 Cor. 4:10).
- In the (eternal) seed is a secret life through which the believer lives. “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’” (Matt. 4:4).
- This increase of Jesus’s life WITHIN the Christ is different for different people, most likely based on their obedience.
- It is of great importance that this seed’s increase is specified as fruit. Fruit is henceforth the measure in which all believers are known and judged.
- The Father is glorified through the fruit that the Body of Christ bears.
- This “fruit of the Spirit” (Gal. 5:22) is there so that the world can partake of it. In this way alone the “godly nature” is known, namely that to godliness is added “brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love” (2 Pet. 1:4:7).
- The entire world eats, and lives, from the fruit of the Christ! Selah!
The teachings were then concluded with the following: the fruit is there to be eaten for others, but with a remarkably hidden goal …
In 2 Cor. 3:2 Paul writes: “You are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read by all men …” We can also read this as: You are God’s poem … This letter or poem of God, the Logos composed of rhema words, becomes the fruit that is eaten by all people, believers and unbelievers alike, and which enables life in the spirit. This amazing mystical truth was explained with a metaphor that borders up against it in the teaching of Day 1130-1135 (which we are going to repeat a few paragraphs of, for the sake of clarity and context). Here the Letter or Poem is referred to as a Bread, that is parcelled out in various pieces (or then, words)!
In John 6 we find an extended conversation between Jesus and all His followers, and the golden thread throughout the conversation is what “the true bread” (John 6:32) is. Jesus brings a clear contrast between the bread which He offers, and the Old Testament bread which they are familiar with from the time of Moses in the desert: “Our fathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ Then Jesus said to them, ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, Moses did not give you the bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven.’” (John 6:31-32).
WHAT this bread from heaven is, is absolutely integral to their identity, as the word manna comes from the phrase “What is it?” (BDB). WE DO NOT YET KNOW WHAT WE ARE GOING TO BE AFTER THE APOKALUPSIS, THE REVELATION, THE UNVEILING. We are clearly still sealed. The actual sweet wafer the Israelites had to consume in the desert is a symbolic counterpart of the rhema-words of God.
From verse 32 onwards Jesus starts explaining, in quite a bit of detail, that He is the Bread of life, calling it the “true bread”, the Fullness, the Logos, the Total Utterance. The writer J Preston Eby, in his article ‘The Melchizedek Connection’ (http://www.sigler.org/eby/priest25.html), aptly notes, “The Speech of God became the Son of God in human form.” Selah. But He also starts sensitising them to the fact that He is also the Christ, and consists of a manifold other pieces of manna, portions of the complete Bread (yes, twelve baskets of authority!), the rhema-words, the small utterances making up the Total Utterance! And even if they do not understand, they ask, “Lord, give us this bread always.” (John 6:34), “at all times, always, ever” (Strong). In this light it is absolutely clear what Jesus had said in Matt. 4:4: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” And these words are rhema-words. And take note – every word! As Jesus descended from heaven (John 6:38), the rhema–words descend from the heavens, the spiritual realm, to the physical realm.
To what does this statement thus refer? Preceded by two miracles (Part I and Part II of John 6), it is thus the absolutely perfect time to explain to humanity one of the greatest mysteries of God and his incarnation. According to http://www.gotquestions.org/ incarnation merely means “the act of being made flesh,” whilst the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it in more explicitly spiritual terms as “the embodiment of a deity or spirit in some earthly form”. The term derives from the Latin translation of John 1:14: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Because of the almost exclusive use of the Latin Vulgate in the church of the Middle Ages, this term became widely used.
The process of incarnation that Jesus underwent as God, is called in 1 Tim. 3:16 “the mystery of godliness” – “God was manifested in the flesh”. In Phil. 2:6-8 in the Message this incarnation is presented beautifully: “He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death–and the worst kind of death at that: a crucifixion.”
The incarnation is traditionally, in Christian thought, only linked to the Son, Jesus, who is God (John 10:30), and who became man. But if one returns to 1 Tim. 3:16 quoted earlier, and the Scripture is read in context, another possible interpretation also becomes clear. Verses 14-16 of 1 Tim. 3, where Paul writes to his spiritual son, Timothy, reads as follows: “These things I write to you, though I hope to come to you shortly; but if I am delayed, I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up in glory.”
In his Notes on the Bible, Albert Barnes makes the following remark concerning this verse: “Probably there is no passage in the New Testament which has excited so much discussion among critics as this, and none in reference to which it is so difficult to determine the true reading.” The Believers Bible Commentary also makes it clear: “This is a difficult verse. One difficulty is in discerning just how it fits in with what has preceded …” But then he dilutes the absolutely clear implications by quoting from the theologian J.N. Darby’s (very safe) opinion: “This is often quoted and interpreted as if it spoke of the mystery of the Godhead, or the mystery of Christ’s Person. But it is the mystery of godliness, or the secret by which all real godliness is produced—the divine spring of all that can be called piety in man. … Godliness springs from the knowledge of the incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ. … This is how God is known; and from abiding in this flows godliness.”
If one just reads verse 16 in ordinary terms, it sounds absolutely apt if it is applied to Jesus as the Son of God, who then also became the Son of man (the latter a term that is found 86 times in the New Testament) – everything that is noted in the verse, is obviously also true of Him. But the context renders this obvious interpretation less simple. Paul writes to Timothy specifically so that he knows, in Paul as apostle’s absence, how people must behave themselves in the family of God. The church or ekklēsia, Paul writes, is “the pillar and ground of the truth,” literally the Christ, the Body that resides in the Head, the Home of sons (John 14:2; 2 Cor. 5:1). Paul is most certainly speaking of the members of the Body of Christ, and not of Jesus. Therefore it is so strange when he continues in verse 16 by using the phrase “and without controversy,” and linking this with the church.
The phrase “without controversy” is only used once in the New Testament, and it is in this verse. In Greek it derives from the word homologoumenōs, where the prefix homo already explicitly points to “the same.” Homologéō, the basic form, means “to confess,” in the sense of testifying of a truth or belief, “by consent of all” (Thayer). There was thus absolute consensus that the members of the ecclesia themselves experienced “the mystery of godliness”! It is as if this thought is blasphemous for most believers, namely, “we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him” (1 John 3:2). Jesus, Rom. 8:29 (ASV) notes, “is the FIRSTBORN among many brethren”.
A Scripture like the following also clearly points out that God incarnated his children through the process of becoming born again: “when He comes, in that Day, to be glorified in His saints and to be admired among all those who believe” (2 Tess. 1:10). Paul spells it out in Col. 3:3-4: “For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.” Read 1 John 4:2 differently, not just keeping in mind the traditional perspective of the incarnation: “By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God.” And then it is understandable what 2 John 1:7 notes: “For many deceivers have gone out into the world who do not confess Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.”
Back to John 6 – Jesus offers this explanation of the spiritual bread as a miracle. As Old-Testament counterpart Jesus uses the manna in the desert, and explains that there will be an increase of His Body that will be similar to the way in which the manna came down to earth. This manna is Him (John 6:48), but it is presented in smaller portions, “This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die.” (John 6:50).
The words in the paragraph above, Jesus’s incarnation in the Christ, is the key to a deeper understanding of how the seed of Christ becomes flesh in the form of fruit. In Mere Christianity (pp. 174-175), CS Lewis explains it beautifully: “God said that we were ‘gods’ and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him – for we can prevent Him if we choose – He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god … dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly …” Selah!
- Selah: Explain the concept incarnation to someone.
- Read: 2 Chr. 34-36; Ezra 1-6.
- Memorise: Ezra 1:2 (what would this remarkable verse mean in the light of this teaching?).
- For a more in-depth understanding: Read Lewis’s classic book.
