21/06/2025
The New Humanity
2:10 We are engineered by his design; he molded and manufactured us in Christ. We are his workmanship, his poetry. We are fully fit to do good, equipped to give attractive evidence of his likeness in us in everything we do.
2:11 Remember where you came from; [not only were you spiritually dead but] it wasn’t long ago when you were still classified as non-Jewish, judging on the surface you had nothing that linked you to them. They sneered at you because you didn’t share their distinguishing mark of circumcision, which was their claim to fame!
2:12 During that time you were distanced from the Messianic hope; you had nothing in common with Israel. You felt foreign to the covenants of prophetic promise, living a life with nothing to look forward to in a world where God seemed absent.
2:13 But now, wow! Everything has changed; you have discovered yourselves to be located in Christ. What once seemed so distant is now so near; his blood reveals your redeemed innocence and authentic genesis.
2:14 It is in him that we are one and at peace with everyone; he dissolved every definition of division.
2:15 In his incarnation, he rendered the entire Jewish system of ceremonial laws and regulations useless as a measure to justify human life and conduct. In that he died mankind’s death all grounds for tension and hostility were entirely removed. The peace he proclaims reveals one new human race, created and defined in Christ, instead of two groups of people separated by their ethnic identity and differences.
The new human race was intended by Jesus to be lived out not after we die, but after we come to believe in the person of Jesus and His redemptive work. You see eternal life does not start in the graveyard. It starts in the intimate knowing of Jesus.
In fact, this new humanity that Jesus created can only be experienced and expressed by the understanding of our union with Him. I need to mention this in passing that Jesus did not lose His humanity in the Resurrection or Ascension.
Jesus not only died in His humanity, He was also raised in it as the first born from the dead. This is why the Holy Ghost is committed to replicate the ongoing incarnation of Jesus in us and through us!
Learning to be a disciple of Jesus is learning to be human in a world that has become dehumanized. Part of the restoration of all things includes restoring our true humanity. This new humanity is bearing the image of God in the flesh.
God created us as human, not as angels. Bearing the image of God doesn’t mean we become God, Jesus or the Holy Spirit. There is only one Trinity, and we are not it nor will we ever be. However we are partakers of Their divine nature.
This New Creation that we have become can only be lived out by a New Man empowered by the Holy Ghost. The Resurrection power of Jesus now works through the Church to bring about restoration (See Paul’s letters to the Colossians and Ephesians) not hibernation and not evacuation.
What if the intent of a New Creation is to live fully human in the body you have empowered and infused with the Holy Ghost?
God’s dream for the world is a new creation with a new kind of human. God’s dream for the world is a human with a new heart, a pure heart, or more precisely, a TRUE kind of human.
Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s dream for humanity. God’s dream for humanity is not that we might become a spirit floating around but that we might flourish as human beings in a place that God loved and brought into existence.
Sometimes we overestimate the holiness of humanity and underestimate the humanity of holiness. The Holy Ghost does not destroy our human nature to make us “partakers of the divine nature,” but redeems and restores our human nature and makes it receptive to the divine.
Much Love
