A number of years ago I became intrigued by an interview between a young journalist and a much older catholic priest who, for some 60 years, had run an exorcism ministry for people brought to him from around the world.
Not being easily persuadable by sensationalism, I confess to having been immediately skeptical of his testimony. But being a student of the Bible I also knew that the demonic world was real and that the New Testament provided multiple accounts of demons being cast out of people by Jesus and the apostles. Even seven sons of Sceva, who were not true believers, were able to provoke a violent response from them (Acts 19:13-16).
As I listened to the interview the old priest recounted story after story of his encounter with entities so malevolent that they would do anything they could to defile the subjects they inhabited, and his attempts to dispatch them in the name of Jesus. At one point in the interview, however, the young journalist asked an arresting question. “Is there anything that you can identify in your experiences with these beings,” he inquired, “that you can say all of your encounters with them have in common?”
And without hesitation, without even having to think about his answer, the priest replied, “Yes. There is one thing that I can tell you all of my experiences with these entities have unequivocally had in common: Their utter contempt for human beings.”
Now whatever you may think of exorcism ministries, there can be little doubt about the truth of his answer based on everything we know from the New Testament about Satan and the diabolical spirits that serve him, which had me convinced that the encounters that old priest was having with them were real. Satan despises everything about God, about Jesus and about human beings, as do all of his cohorts, and they despise God’s plans for humanity with a hatred no one can really fathom. And the question that automatically presents itself in light of it is, “Why?” Why would spiritual beings, who we, and they, know are far more powerful and formidable than we are, despise us so fanatically that their greatest longing is for our eternal destruction and our persistent humiliation?
Fortunately, the Bible provides us with what seems to be a clear answer to this question. God’s plans for human beings are different than are His plans for angels. In fact, a rhetorical question asked in Hebrews 1:14 provides a profound insight into God’s design for the relationship He intended would exist between humans and angels. “Are not all angels ministering spirits,” the writer of Hebrews asked, “sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?” [Emphasis added].
And of course the implied answer is, indeed they are. If that is true, however, then it seems very likely that this requirement of service is what acted as the catalyst for Satan’s rebellion and his attempt to thwart God’s plans for human beings in the Garden of Eden, his pride in his preeminent status as one of God’s spiritual elite (cf. Ezekiel 28:12-17 and Isaiah 14:12-15)having impaired the humble condescension he would need to be an effective servant of beings that would become God’s children.
Of course, the distinction between God’s designed roles for angels and human beings tells us something important about humanity’s status with God. When the Bible tells us that God made us in His image it never tells us that He ever accorded angels the same privilege. Nor, significantly, does the Bible ever tell us that angels, unlike those redeemed by Christ, are ever accorded the honour of calling God their “Father.”
These two privileges, it seems, are only ever accorded to human beings and, conjoined, imply that there is an inseparable link between our having been made in God’s image and our ability, once redeemed, to call God, “Father. And that link is Christ.
To understand this sublime mystery, however, it is necessary for us first to understand the nature of God in whose image we have been made and for whose glory we exist. And that is because it was always God’s intention to create for Himself a spiritual family composed of children who were so distinctly like Him that, although they inhabited physical bodies and a material universe, they shared in His spiritual nature so completely that they were able literally to join with Him in a kind of oneness that only exists within the triune nature of God Himself.
Spiritual Unity within the Trinity
Although the word “trinity” does not exist in the Bible, the Scriptures make clear that God is triune – that He exists as three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, who are unified together in such a way that they form one essence. To that end, to help us understand the nature of trinity in the simplest terms possible Jesus described each of the members of the trinity as effectively abiding “in” one another.
Consider, for example, His statement to Phillip about His relationship with the Father in John 14:9-11: Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.
Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.
In this statement Jesus depicted His relationship with the Father as a profound spiritual oneness or unity. According to Jesus, He and the Father are “in” one another. And He characterized this “in-ness” as a kind of melding of souls, or a joining, that unifies them together in all that they are and do. Consequently, they act as one, think as one and exist as one. In fact, their spiritual “Inness,” or “oneness,” is so intimate that, while each member of the trinity remains a distinct person, what is true of one is always perpetually true of the others as well. Hence their shared common attributes and Scripture’s persistent suggestions that they are co-equal and co-identical.
This is co-identity is obviously seen in Jesus’ assertion that anyone who had seen Him had seen the Father. But it is also seen in other places in the New Testament where, for example, the Holy Spirit who, though He is personally distinct from the Son, is overtly represented by the Biblical writers to be the Spirit of Jesus Himself (Acts 16:7, Galatians 4:6 and Philippians 1:19).
Certainly we may conclude that the apostle Paul saw things this way, having forthrightly proclaimed that, “The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (1 Corinthians 3:17).
Using the same example He provided His disciples, on another occasion Jesus related His co-identity with the Father to the Pharisees. “I and the Father are one,” He told them (John 10:30), trying to help them understand who He was and the divine origin of His ministry. But they became enraged at the suggestion. After all, the import of His statement was obvious. Jesus was claiming to be God – the eternal I Am: the One who created the universe, who had flooded the earth, who had liberated Israel from its bondage to slavery in Egypt and who was the eternal source and center of its national identity. The mere suggestion, they reasoned, was blasphemy, and for it they immediately sought His death (John 10: 31-33).
On still another occasion, shortly before His crucifixion, Jesus again expressed His indivisible unity with the Father in prayer: “I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message,” He asked, “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you” (John 17:20-21). Of course, the unqualified import of all of these examples is that the Bible reveals that the members of the trinity exist in a spiritual union with one another that is so intimate that they may be deemed, for all practical purposes, to be “in” one another, and that their spiritual “in-ness,” or “oneness,” is what makes the God’s essence simultaneously three, and one.
Naturally, then, that makes God unique in the universe, since no other being eternally abides in such a state. That is, unless God chooses to make other beings distinctly like Him who can eternally join with Him in His unity; beings He fashioned in His image who had the capacity spiritually to unify with Him and so become partakers of His divine nature – indeed, beings who could exist “in” Him in exactly the same way the members of the trinity exist “in” one another.
And this is precisely what the Scriptures tell us God did. He made human beings in His imageand likeness; an image and likeness that did not merely consist of their possession of a set of spiritual attributes that resembled His, but an image and likeness so akin to His spiritual nature that they had the capacity literally to unify with Him in exactly the same way the members of the trinity were unified together.
To accomplish this, however, He would need do the unthinkable. Something the powers of darkness could never have imagined He would deign to do. He would become one of them, and would eternally fuse His divine nature with their human nature so that their unity and identity would forever be intertwined. And so the eternal Son entered the world. And through His life, death and resurrection He revealed not only the depth of His love for them, but His willingness to share in their life, and their death, as much as He wanted them to share in His. Through Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross, therefore, a way was made for God and His children to be eternally united with Him so that their lives were forever bound up in one another’s.
Our Spiritual Unity with Christ
Of course, this is the essence of Gospel, and it is unarguably the greatest story ever told. Our modern conveyance of it, however, typically involves simplifying it for people by simply telling them that God loves them and that He became a man in the person of Jesus, who died on the cross to pay for their sins. Moreover, it is when we believe that Christ died for our sins, when we receive Him and when we repent of the things we do that oppose God’s will, that God will save us and give us eternal life with Him. And as a deposit and guarantee of that life God will come to live inside of us through the person of the Holy Spirit and it is by that union we become children of God. And of course this simplicity is important, because it is the simplest of aspects of the Gospel are what reach the human heart.
But that simplified story is not the whole story. For the mature, there is another, deeper aspect to the Gospel that, when understood, brings them into a greater understanding of the depths of God’s love for them and the glory to which they have been called. And the rest of that story is that our unity with God extends far beyond our simply having the Holy Spirit to live inside of us.
The Scriptures teach that when I receive Jesus not only does God place His Holy Spirit in me, but He also places me directly into Christ. I am, in other words, spiritually unified with Jesus and-the Holy Spirit simultaneously. And these two unions are not the same.
Indeed, in the mechanics of salvation it is necessary for me first to be unified with Christ even before I can receive the Holy Spirit, because God is innately holy and thus cannot spiritually unify with anything that is evil or remotely unclean. Accordingly, I must first be cleansed. My sin and its eternal consequences must first be removed completely from me so that God in His holiness can indwell me by His Spirit. And this is where Jesus fulfills a most critical role. His death on the cross paid for my sin. But it did much more than that; for it is not merely payment for my sin that I need, but it is the complete removal of its stain from me that is essential to my acceptability to God. I need, in effect, to be guiltless. Indeed, I need to be made holy.
And so in salvation God through Christ does more than one extraordinary miracle for me.Beyond paying for my sins, when I receive Christ as Lord and saviour God also spiritually includes me in His death on the cross – not figuratively, but literally. That is, by a sovereign act of God’s grace I am formally placed into Christ and our resultant union means that the actual transference of my sin to Him and of His righteous to me really happens. That is, by that union Jesus actually becomes contaminated with my sin – because that union is real – and so He actually becomes guilty of it for me. That is why He endured God’s wrath on the cross. And we know He did because of that guilt because God does not punish the innocent.
Simultaneously, by that union I actually become cleansed by His righteousness because, just as the members of the trinity are “in” one another so that what is true of one is true of the others, so when I am united with Christ – or, placed “in” Him – what is true of Him becomes true of me.
Accordingly His righteousness as God “contaminates” me in the most positive and wonderful way and I actually am made Holy, having been fully cleansed, and allowing me to be indwelled by God’s Holy Spirit. Now obviously this transaction is a spiritual one, and it is a phenomenon unique to the spiritual realm and of our having been made in God’s image, a likeness with Him God knew we would need in order truly to spiritually unify with Him.
The important thing to know is that this miraculous union with God, forged for us with Christ at the moment of our salvation, is real. It is not merely a figure of speech or a mere theological concept. It is one hundred percent genuine. And as a result, Christ actually becomes guilty for my sin and I actually become Holy because of His righteousness. It was with this in mind that Paul wrote, “Once you were alienated from God... But now He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in His sight, without blemish and free from accusation” (Colossians 1:21-22). And “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). This is why our discussion about the nature of the spiritual relationship that exists between the members of the trinity was so important. The precise nature of that relationship is what Jesus used to convey to his disciples the depth of the unity that God had planned for us with Him.
It is,He tells us, identical to the unity shared by the members of the trinity. That is why Jesus said to them: “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” (John 14:20). And why He asked the Father to ensure the future unity they had planned for humanity from the creation of the world thus: “My prayer is not for them alone,” He entreated. “I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me (John 17:19-21).
It is impossible to overstate the significance of these words – particularly the words “just as” – to understanding what Jesus was trying to show us about the kind of unity God created us to have with Him. They mean “in the same way as,” or “in an identical manner to,” which means that if we are to understand what the Bible means when it says we are “in Christ” we need to understand what Jesus actually meant when He said that He was in the Father and the Father was in Him.
It was his understanding of the believer’s incredible unity with Christ that underpinned the whole of the Paul’s theology in the New Testament and which led to all of his great statements about the glory of the salvation God has imparted to us. For Paul, everything about a believer’s life and existence was rooted “in Christ.” It began and ended there, and he used the phrase or its derivatives more than eighty five times in his letters to emphasise how important it is to understanding what God has done for us in salvation. In Ephesians alone Paul uses the phrase or its derivatives some 25 times.
Here are but a few of his uses:2 Corinthians 5:21 “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Romans 6:10-11 “The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
Romans 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus ourLord.”
Romans 8:1 “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
1 Corinthians 15:22 “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.”
Ephesians 1:7-8 “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding.”
Ephesians 1:13-14 “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession – to the praise of his glory.”
The Gospel proclaims a new life from God for the soul; a life that consists of a glorious, inimitable union with Him unlike any that exists in the universe, save the one the members of the trinity share together. It is a life derived from the very life of God Himself because, unlike any other created beings in the universe, He created us to live in Him and He in us. This life, however, begins and ends with Jesus. Through His sacrifice for us God is free to indwell us with
His Spirit and we are born into His family as entirely new creations; as people born of God and eternally united with Him, as the Scriptures declare: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:17-19).
The implications of what it means for us to be in Christ are beyond our comprehension, and it is one of the most important theological concepts in the Bible. To be “in Christ” is far more than just a figure of speech, for it connotes a spiritual reality for us so profound and so incomparable that even angels long to look into what God has done for us through the Gospel and our unity with Christ (cf. 1 Peter 1:10-12).
Space does not permit us to review the over one hundred and twenty instances that the New Testament highlights or references our unity with Jesus as believers and what it means for us to live in Him. But they range in scope on topics that include our life, glory, innocence, approval, freedom, sanctity, grace, childhood, hope, triumph, blessing, newness, unity, royalty, forgiveness, encouragement, resurrection and many, many more. The extraordinary blessing and richness of the unity with God that has been granted to us eclipses all known relationships in the universe, and next to the contemplation of God there is surely no greater meditation in all of Christian theology than what it means for us to be “in Christ.”
May every believer and of all who bear His name make it their solemn enterprise to become as intimately acquainted with this great truth as is humanly possible so that we may we ever be able to say with Paul, “Whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ – the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:7-11)
