Relationships Part Four

Concluding Thoughts
 
The overlapping lenses of “Homoousion – sameness of essence and nature” and “inter-relational dynamics of joint and several”, have enabled us to understand, with a little more clarity, the Triune Being and inner-relations of and in the One God. At the same time, other attributes of God are brought to focus.
 
One of them, I dare say, is that God is able to have new, authentic and experiential actualities. An explanation is warranted here.
 
Creation, contingent on God, will always be and remain only creation.[1] God was never a man before he became a man.[2] It would be proper then to say, that in becoming a man, a human, a creature of creation, a created being, God had become something that he was not. Becoming man can be considered to be a new, authentic and experiential actuality for God.
 
As such, God with us, in God becoming man, has immense and momentous implications.
 
For God, it means that within the actual Being of Triune God, there is now also a man, a created being, in whom the fullness of the Godhead (Deity) dwells, fully occupies and lives, inhabits bodily[3].
 
Where there were only Three, now it can, properly, also be said that with, in and through the one person of Christ Jesus, being  “homoousion – sameness of essence and nature” with God according to Divinity and “homoousion – sameness of essence and nature” with us according to  humanity, there is now a man, human nature, in the actual Being of God.
 
“Christ crucified” is pregnant with this meaning. No wonder, to the Jews it was a stumbling block[4]. They could not conceive and accept that Christ Jesus, the man, that they crucified[5], could, at the same time, also, be God. For the Greeks, who honoured and pursued wisdom, this is foolishness as what is divine is divine and what is human is human. They could conceive in their mythology demigods, entities that resulted from the union of gods and humans. But God becoming human, becoming this man Jesus who was crucified, this they could not comprehend. Hence, complete and utter foolishness as far as they were concerned.
 
Both Jews and Greeks distinguished between divinity and humanity and rightly so. This several approach could only have provided an either/or lens through which to relate and view Christ Jesus. If only they had applied the joint and several lens, they would have caught a glimpse of Christ in actuality, being the power and wisdom of God.[6]
 
A revelation of God in the Son becoming man would be that God also grows experientially, for until the Son became a man, God did not know what it was to be a man.


[1] Acts 17:28

[2] Numbers 23:19  The prophet Balaam in Numbers 23:19  also asserted this understanding  of God not being a man “God is not a man that He should lie.” Note that this was before God became flesh, a man, in the person of Christ Jesus.

[3] Colossians 2:9

[4] 1 Corinthians 1:23

[5] Matthew 20:19, Mark 15:13, Luke 23:21, John 19:6

[6] 1 Corinthians 1:24

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