Are You Still Clothed Under The Image Of The Beast?

THE SYMBOL OF CHALCEDON

truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body

We already covered much of this hypostatic question in our last meditation on the Creed and the selected Scriptures. This statement “truly God and truly man” is often confused with the statement “fully God and fully man,” which is a watered-down version in the debate against those who imagine that the hypostatic union is fifty percent God and fifty percent man, combined together, making Him one person in body and soul. But at no time was Jesus of Nazareth less than God or less than human in how He grew up into a fully matured adult from infancy to die as the God-man (or Mediator (1Tim.2:5-6; Heb.8:3-6; 9:13-18; 12:22-24; Gal.3:19-25; Job.33:23; Ps.11:7) who truly represents both God and man to force the perfect justice of God to kiss the perfect mercy and grace of God so that the blameless reputation of God would remain both just and gracious in the human mind of the Christian worldview (Ps.85:9-11; 2:5-7; Heb.1:5-14; 2:9, 14-15; 3:1-6), revealing to us that God is both just and the justifier of ungodly men when He forgives sin by the substitutionary death and life of Christ (Pr.17:15; Rom.3:21-26; 2Cor.5:21).

This subject of “truly God and truly man” should silence the quarrel that says that we say Jesus was just Deity jammed into a human shell like a turtle against those of us who believe that Christ didn’t need to take on a human soul to become flesh and blood when we properly distinguish “the human mind” (or nous) from the personal soul (or psyche). Sometimes in the Bible “psyche” is rightly translated as “mind,” but again, when this is used in reference to Jesus of Nazareth (Jn.12:27; Matt.12:18), it is not referring to his human reasoning developing through the limitations of the nous/noos isolated from the divine soul and Spirit of God but to his divine reasoning ruling over the human portion of the ‘nous’ in the animal spirit of His human mind (Gen.4:7; Col.1:19-20; 2:9-10). The “nous” is always referring to the human portion of our reasoning by which we are enslaved to the limitations of the spirit of the flesh by virtue of its own nature (Rom.1:28; Lev.17:11; 1Cor.15:45), which is corrupted (debased) and continually corrupts the psyche/soul having been given over to the animal spirit in the judgment (2Cor.7:1; 1Cor.15:45). God is in none of this portion of our thoughts as sinners according to the life of the flesh (Ps.10:4; 2Cor.5:16; Lev.17:11; Heb.10:4, 11; Rom.11:27). See Matt.23:28 and how the statement of Jesus contradicts the traditional imagination, which teaches that, even as natural human creations, we are moral beings made in the image of God. But is God lawless (1Jn.3:4)? Isn’t it the very nature of hypocrisy to set up a standard that is entirely false as though it is true (Matt.12:33)? How is being filled with hypocrisy a moral image of God at all since God is light and in Him is no darkness at all (1Jn.1:5)? How does an “empty” soul filled with hypocrisy have any moral likeness of God in its parts at all (Matt.6:23; Isa.8:20; Eph.5:8)?

The “animal” nature that now dominates the soul (Ecc.8:8-9), which was originally made for divine reasoning in uprightness of the spirit (Ecc.7:29; Dt.9:5; 1Chr.29:17; Job.1:8), not through the nous only, but through the phronema (Rom.8:6-8), is the disposition of sin (or the unbecoming of the divine understanding as a debased nous) at enmity with God because there is no true spiritual reasoning in it (1Cor.2:14-16/emphasis: v.14; Rom.1:20-21). Through the law of sin and the likeness of our spiritual death, because of Adam’s fall (original sin), the divine “reasoning” was lost to the total corruption of the soul (Matt.16:26; Rom.1:25-26), and therefore, the soul/psyche was lost to the reasoning of the animal spirit leading to death and destruction through the corruption of the sinful nature (Ps.10:4 (NKJV)). Conscience is not the image of God (Matt.23:28), nor is it the moral law of God written on the heart but (the work) of the moral law (as a law of sin) written on the heart according to the flesh (Rom.2:14-15; 5:19a, 20a; 7:23 1Cor.15:56; Rom.8:2-4; Jer.31:33). The animal nature (Ecc.3:16-21), then, is of the spirit of this world ruled by the prince and power of the air deluded by his own darkness according to the nature of the evil of the lie (1Cor.15:21-22; Eph.2:1-3; 2Thess.2:7, 9-12). But the psyche/soul that is lost to the disposition of sin is the life of the flesh, which corrupts the spirit of the world with death, and the spirit of the world mutually corrupting the soul that continues to abide in the darkness of death (Lk.19:10). But the reasonable soul of Christ was not the life of the flesh but the life of God in the same way a redeemed soul is no longer the breath of the flesh but the breath of heaven (Jn.3:6-8; 1Cor.15:45). The soul of Christ was not born or generated in any way by the life of God but is the life of the very life of God (Jn.1:3-4; Rom.8:29-30; 12:1-2; Heb.11:6; 12:1-2).

A debased mind reasons like the voice of the serpent by twisting everything God says (Gen.3:12); first, in nature (Gen.3:14); and second, according to revelation (Gen.3:17-19), to satisfy its own ends (Gen.3:1, 4-5), which is why the nature of sin is the insanity of the disposition of the human reasoning that suppresses the revelation of God’s wrath in the death of the creation against the truth that God is sovereignly and righteously ruling over the nature of death in His own perfect justice (Rom.1:18-21; Gen.3:21; Ps.10:4; 14:1). Looking at Romans 1:26 again, we see that “for this reason” God gave them over to the vile passions (or to spirit of the flesh), distinguishing “their women” from the image of God as the standard of truth (1Jn.2:19; Jn.1:3), for “male and female God made ‘them’” by the standard of Adam’s (the man’s) singular relationship to the image of God by clothing ‘them’ in animal skin to illustrate the death that Adam brought into the world as the judgment over his wife Eve (1Cor.6:15-16; Ecc.7:27-8:1; Ps.49:14-20). She is now in his death through her relationship to his sin with him as the representative image of her sin (Rom.5:14; 1Tim.2:14). But since Christ is the last Adam, and Adam was given a new lineage as of the “light of life” (Jn.3:19-21; Gen.4:16-5:4), this judgment cannot abide in those made to walk in the light of life with the Lord from heaven as the new standard image of that economy of life (Jn.8:12; Job.33:30: Ps.56:13; 36:9).

But what is the reason of “for this reason” in Romans 1:26 if it is not referring to the exchange of the image of truth for the nature of the lie (Gen.3:4)? Aren’t “their” women rightly referred to as among a debased ‘nous,’ which is the undoing (or unbecoming) of the honor of being made to walk with God according to all knowledge, righteousness, and truth through the divinity of His holiness (Eph.4:20-24; Rom.12:2; Col.3:9-10)? Together, then, “they/them” are truly less than a spiritual man under the evil scheme of the present darkness of the world that rebels against God’s uprightness (Ecc.7:29; Ps.15:1-2; Dt.32:4; Ps.22:6; Isa.66:24). It is clear since we must put off the old man and put on the new man (Eph.4:20-24; Col.3:9-10), that the image of God is exclusive to the people of the redeemed church of Jesus Christ (Rom.5:12-21; 12:1-2). Again, “their” disposition of understanding is phronema dianoian, which is against the disposition of understanding given to the regenerate (1Jn.5:20). You can’t reason with a dead man (Eph.2:1-3), for the “mind” set on the flesh cannot reason with God (Rom.8:5-7). A new dianoian (disposition) must be given to “them” against their phronema (mindset) (1Jn.5:19-20/emphasis: v.20; Matt.5:29). The human ‘nous,’ then, must be opened through the power of the Spirit of understanding (Lk.24:45; Pr.30:1-5; Rom.10:3-13; Acts 16:14).

The hypostatic union of Jesus Christ, then, comes to restore in us the soul’s proper liberty over the animal spirit as ‘true man,’ and even though the animal spirit is not destroyed and cannot be destroyed until the body of sin and death is completely put off (Rom.7:24-25; 1Jn.3:8; Heb.2:14; Phil.3:10), it is rendered powerless through the invasion of the Holy Spirit (1Cor.15:36; Rom.6:6-14; 2Cor.3:17-4:6), whereby the psyche/soul is liberated to reason with divinity as was God’s goodwill from the beginning toward man (Gen.3:15; Lk.2:10-14). Therefore, this is what makes for a reasonable [or rational] soul whereby Christ is truly man but has never forfeited the truly divine soul to become a man (Phil.2:5; 1Cor.2:16), something that is truly God could never forfeit (Phil.2:6-11; Acts 2:23-27), since God cannot and does not change (Mal.3:6). As sinners, we all have forfeited this divine soul of reasoning whereby we had fellowship with the truth of God in exchange for the lie of the animal spirit to obtain all that the beauty of this world has to offer through Adam as our original representative of that reasoning (Rom.5:12; Lk.9:25). But there was no sin in the soul/psyche of Jesus. He was holy, harmless, and undefiled to the very end because He is the incorruptible soul of God as the Holy One (Pr.9:10; Isa.1:4; 5:19, 24; 10:20; 37:23; 40:25; 41:14; 43:3, 15; 54:5; Acts 3:14; 1Jn.2:20; Heb.7:23-28; Rom.8:3-4). Death could not hold Him because He is truly God (Lk.1:35; Acts 2:24, 27, 31), but death did truly seize Him for a moment because He is truly man (Phil.2:7-8). Because He had a truly human mind ‘nous,’ His mind had to develop like a human mind (Lk.2:39-40, 52; Jn.6:61), but His divine soul was not developing (Jn.1:14, 48). His soul was not being shaped (or filled) by the animal spirit (Jn.1:14; Lk.1:80), but his soul was developing His human mind (Jn.2:24-25; 6:61). The soul of Christ is the mold by which we are shaped as clay in the Potter’s hands (Rom.9:20-24; Zech.11:13; Lam.4:2; ). But if as clay you were never put into the mold (Rom.11:16), what does that make you in the Potter’s house (Gen.1:2)? Are you still fashionable (Jer.18:6; 19:11; 2Tim.2:20-21)? Can you still be joined to this hypostatic union in body and soul to be preserved blameless in the Lord from heaven (1Thess.5:23; Rom.8:10-11; 6:1-14; 8:23-30)?

This interpretation admirably fits the expressions “baptize with the symbol” and “symbol of the Trinity”; while Tertullian’s remark that “a law of baptism (lex tinguendi) was laid down and the form was prescribed: ‘Go,’ He said, ‘teach the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’,” illustrates the use of “law of the symbol”.

Exactly the same usage of symbolum is implied in the passage of St Augustine which has already been mentioned, where he states that “it is no true Christian baptism if the evangelical words of which the symbol consists are missing”.

J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, Third Edition. (London; New York: Continuum, 2006), 57.