Mystery of One in Christ

<p> About 2000 years before Jesus was born God took Abraham and Sarah and chose them to be the parents of a Nation and a culture that he would set aside to reveal himself to, and for about 1500 of those 2000 years that Nation would be trained up in the Jewish religion. God invested his love and wisdom and truth and power and discipline into them. It was as if a nation were kidnapped and put in custody for 2000 years as a test case for humanity under the caring government of a true and just God.</p> <p>They represented, in their good and bad responses and reactions to God’s investment in them, how the rest of humanity in its entirety would respond and react to a God who would claim them all in due time by joining his life to ours in the person of Jesus Christ, the Jewish Messiah. He wants to reveal himself to all of us and invest his love and wisdom and truth and power and Fatherly discipline in all of us. Humanity in total has always been the object of God’s passionate love, and when the Jewish Christ/Messiah was born into the earth he brought the fulness of God into all of humanity, not just from that time and into the future, but also redemptively all the way back to Adam and Eve and Noah and Abraham. After Jesus died on the cross he took the keys of hell and death in his resurrection and opened the gates of Heaven for all those people that existed before Christ’s death.  The Scriptures are clear; We have always been in his sights, but unfortunately he is not always in ours. The apostle Paul grew up in the Jewish religion as a true authority in the Way of the Jewish faith. He was then taken by Christ to become the true authority to the rest of humanity in the new Way of the mystery of Christ/Messiah. </p> <p>Paul understood the profound differences between us all and yet the stark sameness of us all. He speaks to us about himself, who once thought as a child and then grew up to think as one who has come of age. As a very small child we all have the potential to become formed into whatever national and c