Part 2 – Gentile Union With God

This Article is part of a multi-part Study Series called Union with God.

 

But now, today, since God saved Saul of Tarsus (Act 9) and made him to be “Paul… THE Apostle to the Gentiles” (Rom 11:13) we enjoy an entirely new program of God for the Gentiles. Thus here Paul describes the condition of Gentiles in what Paul calls “time past.”

Ephesians 2:11-12 (KJV) Wherefore remember, that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh (racially), who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called the Circumcision in the flesh made by hands; 12  That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world:

Paul goes onto say, “But now”…

Ephesians 2:13 But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.

Ephesians 2:19 Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God;

Ephesians 5:8 For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light:

Though the majority of mankind is still fallen away from God and in darkness, the foundation of the Christian revelation is that God Himself made it possible to fill man’s most basic need – to have intimate union with Him. Christ, by His shed blood and death, has reconciled and justified fallen mankind – all that is needed is for us to receive Jesus Christ as the resurrected Savior. John 1:12 (KJV) But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:

God, who “is Spirit” (John 4:24), planned that man, who had been created in His image with the human “spirit of man,” (Zech. 12:1) was destined to live in by a spiritual inner union with Him He IN them, and they IN Him as one organism, much as a tree with its branches. Jesus’ real “Lord’s prayer” is in John 17. It reveals the desire of His heart of love that was ‘yet to be fulfilled.’

John 17:23 (AMP) I in them and You in Me, in order that they may become one and perfectly united, that the world may know and [definitely] recognize that You sent Me and that You have loved them [even] as You have loved Me.
John 17:26 (AMP)
I have made Your Name known to them (Father) and revealed Your character and Your very Self, and I will continue to make [You] known, that the love which You have bestowed upon Me may be in them [felt in their hearts] and that I [Myself] may be in them.

But now, as Paul says, man can have the intimate union with the Lord that he unknowingly has longed for… “he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit (1Cor 6:17). This would mean that man may constantly realize the presence, power, and wisdom of God within him and man may continually draw on these unending resources for all his activities.  Every believer should realize that he is “in Christ” (1Cor 12:13) as a literal member of “His body.” Thus we may share in and enjoy His love and the security of being “in Him,” while also sharing in His eternal program and purposes. No matter how great the temporary manifestations of evil and difficulties are manifested around and against us...we know Him and that we are forever one with Him.

This union was and still is God’s planned relationship between Himself and His offspring. It didn’t work out this way in the Garden. God knew our first parents would exercise their free will wrongly; free will is the primary characteristic of our self-creaturehood. They rejected the God-ordained dependent relationship of union with God, the creature in union with the creator, and chose ‘separation’ - individual independence, the enthronement of the Self, the Ego, and thereby the dethronement of God as their Lord. Isaiah wrote; “we have turned every one to his own way” (Isaiah 53:6). 

 

In God’s changeless love and mercy He continued His eternal plan to remedy His foreknown fall of man. Man had become an upside-down creature, with his spirit fallen. To use a Biblical description, man’s spirit “died” to the life of “the Spirit,” and had come alive to the “Sin in the flesh” (Rom 8:3b).  The order, therefore, must be reversed.  But man can’t do this in and of himself. He is guilty before His Holy Judge, blind to his true condition, and helpless to remedy it.  So God comes and does it for man, voluntarily, in the person of His incarnated Son. Man is “reconciled” to God by Christ’s substitutionary death; dying for us and as us.