Heirs of God

I was reading Ephesians yesterday and I noticed that we are both the heirs of God and the inheritance of God. We are in Christ and Christ is in us. The relationship between God and man is paradoxical. Faith is a gift of God and the means for receiving the gift. We are filled with the Spirit, yet in Him we live and move and have our being.

We inhabit what is visibly a three-dimensional space plus time. It is almost impossible for us to think concretely in terms of multiple dimensions. God certainly inhabits a multiplicity of dimensions and is outside, or better, transcends the dimension of time. What seems like paradox in the space-time continuum available to our animal senses is not only possible but perhaps even obvious when viewed “from above” in additional dimensions. (And by the way, I wrote this before I read the comment on the Dawkins post.)

Christ is the Vine and I am a branch. I have grapevines growing in my backyard. I do not think, often, of the vine versus the branch. I look at a vine and see a vine. It is only when I need to do some pruning that a branch takes on separate significance. The vine-branch picture is about as good as we can do for showing the relationship.

While the vine could exist of itself and alone, it would be a rather pointless existence. God, alone, is still God, still whole, complete, and real. Yet, because of His very nature, like the vine, He will not exist alone, un-branched, if you will. As the vine will produce branches, so God will produce sons. Like the branch, we are part of Christ, and, just as the branch draws life from the vine, so we live because of the life of Christ flowing through us.

We are “heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ” because all that we are and have comes through the Vine. We are receiving life, abundant life. But what we receive is not for ourselves any more than the branch draws sap for its own growth. We live in order to be the inheritance of God, in order to blossom and produce the fruit which, in turn, contains the seed. We are sons yet we “father” the fruit that spreads the life of God to others.

Natural life is a reflection of the real life of the spirit. Everything producing after its kind, seed-bearing fruit, is a first principle which is related in the opening lines of Genesis. Replicating Himself is one of the things God does. No wonder the materialist finally stumbles upon the truth found in the gene that wants to reproduce itself. The sage won’t chastise him for being a couple of millennia late.