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 “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, bur Christ lives in me and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”

Galatians 2:20

Father Matta El-Meskeen (Matthew the Poor)


 

 

THERE EXISTS a Divine saying that: “if One died for all, then all died.”1 This is God’s miracle perpetrated in Christ through Christ’s obedience, incarnation, and acceptance of death as a sinner, though He was pure and holy, which made His son’s death a redemption for whoever believed in it. The apostle Paul here proclaims—based on this Divine truth—that he was crucified with Christ and thus necessarily died through Christ’s death, rose through His resurrection, meaning he became alive through His life, so that his living is in Christ living: “because I live, you will live also”2, Christ is alive in him. This Divine truth was the Father’s purpose since the beginning till God’s Son became incarnated fulfilling the Father’s purpose that all should accept Christ’s life and thus Christ is alive in all. Or rather that all should be alive in God after having been dead through sins and transgression. Christ took on the body that is ours with its sins and transgressions, and gave us His body resurrected from death and alive through God.

If we live now in body it is through the grace of faith that we live, not that we live through ourselves, but our life is the life of Christ in us by the love and sacrifice we cannot fathom because it surpasses the limits of our nature. This reveals how God created us a new creation in accordance to the measure of his will in us since the beginning. The Bible says “Where is boasting then?” All the boasting is thus through God and in God who transported us from the darkness of the first creation to His light in the new creation, from the suffering on earth to the joy of the Kingdom of His beloved Son.

Since the beginning God’s will was to provide the creation of mankind, that is in His image, a joyful life with Him. Thus was His only Son’s journey from the Paternal arms in Highest glory to earth’s misery, to share with man his life’s shame and death on the journey to eternity. Because we gained in it the Father’s kingdom inheriting Christ and His Father’s love for Him as the Father’s love for the Son reflected equally on us: “that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.”3 It is attributable to the Father’s love of the Son and our equality in the Father’s love with Christ.

Christ’s sacrifice of Himself was a redeeming sacrifice, death as a replacement for death. The wonder of this sacrifice is that it was offered to all mankind as individuals. So that every man must know and confess that Christ sacrificed Himself a total fulfilling sacrifice for his sake. Nothing remains for Christ for Himself of the sacrifice as it is a redeeming sacrifice. The Father’s pleasure was unimaginable when His Son fulfilled death and resurrection for our sakes, in fulfillment of the eternal Father’s desire before the foundation of the world. It was a secret dependent on completely concealing it from the heavenly assembly of angels, head angels, and heavenly hosts. They are still looking forward to the accomplishment of the day of redemption for man to reveal the mystery of eternity with the Father. The Bible also declares that the Church will accomplish this task when it rises to be in the sphere of the heavenly creation making known to the heavenly creation the mystery of the Son’s sacrifice concerning His incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension, because it is all hidden from their knowledge.4

The heavenly creation will then share the joy of salvation that has become mankind’s. It will also join in worshipping the Son with the twenty four priests that are ready for the moment of revelation and the appearance of the Son openly, and His victorious entrance to His Kingdom followed by His army of the faithful, hailing the glory of God and the Lamb.

19 June, 2005

 1 2 Cor 5:14.

2 John 14:19.

3 John 17:26.

4 Note Eph 3:9-11.

 

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