Salvation as Union with Christ.
We are saved by the Life of Christ. Grace is the science of our union with Christ and of our oneness with God. Oneness is union with participation. All of Christ in all of you and all of you in all of Him. For so long many have viewed the work of Jesus Christ as though it could be separated from His Person. Whenever that is done, we are in the danger of using Jesus Christ as a means to an end, that’s a means to salvation. His Person and saving act are one and the same. Meaning what He has done for us is efficacious due to who He is. And it is not as though He came to make salvation available; to make the potential somehow within reach. These different pictures of salvation can make our understanding of it defective in the way we view who Jesus Christ is, and who we are in Him. It is not as though we can seek for something in Christ other than Christ Himself. If you do not perceive salvation as union with Him, then the Gospel is still foreign to you because “Soteria” in the Koine Greek from which the term salvation is translated speaks of healed unto wholeness; to be saved from your disease.
Salvation is our reintegration into direct communion with God. Our human nature within and without, every aspect of it, is brought into direct communion with God through the incarnation of the Godman.
Salvation also carries the idea of not only being saved but being safe, that is, liberation from the very sense of threat. It speaks of being rescued, which is to be taken out of the danger of destruction, and to be placed in security where we have safety in Christ. This is where we are, it is in whom we are, it is what we have. Jesus Christ is not simply the Saviour of the believer, He is Salvation.
“In Christ” a signature statement of the Apostle Paul is used 144 times to describe what He has done with us. We are certified as being with Him, in Him, through Him. We are conformed, that is to say, we are jointly formed. We have been brought into what God has eternally intended for us to be. We are exhibited as God’s intention in Christ. You are the child God has always wanted.
Salvation is beyond being saved from an adverse consequence. The mission of Christ is not the footnote of Adam’s fall. Jesus Christ is not God’s plan B, activated after His failure to establish a relationship with humanity in Adam. Nothing was planned in Adam in the first place. Christ is the Substance, and Adam is the shadow. If we are viewing Christ’s saving act simply in terms of Him coming to undo the fall or undo what Adam did, we are still not perceiving salvation with an accurate Christian frame of mind.
Salvation refers to not only what we are saved or rescued from, it speaks of that which we are appointed to. It refers to there being an “arche”, an origin, and a “telos”, a consummate end, for which we are brought into being. And once the “arche” which marks the beginning of a thing is brought to its “telos”, it is described as being saved. That which we have been appointed unto, what He saved us for, exceeds what He saved us from. We have been brought into a union of being with the Son of God.
One of the analogies of union is presented by Christ in John 15 which is the Upper Room discourse.
1I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. 2 Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. 3 Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you. 4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. 5 I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.
John 15: 1 – 5
The “Husbandman” is the Vinedresser or the gardener, the one who cultivates. Christ being the True Vine is God’s cultivation of bringing us forth in the same quality of life identical to that of His Son. So we are being sustained by the ever-present love of the Father as the Cultivator.
The branch bears and does not generate its fruits. Fruits bearing means there is an inherent innate nature that the branch participates in and then springs forth fruits as a result. To bear up is an agricultural term which means He works on the branch to enable it, to have a more vital draw of the sap that flows within the vine. We bear the fruit of Christ, and there are branches that do not bear the fruit, and these branches He prunes, He lifts them up to bear fruit, He purges it, which means He cleanses it until it does yield fruits(…)
As we acknowledge the union, the oneness, as we acknowledge that we bear the expression that springs forth from Christ, He says we will bear much fruit, and our joy will be made full.