BEGOTTEN SONS

BEGOTTEN SONSBy John Gavazzoni

It is God's eternal purpose to bring us into union with Himself and according to the essential principle of the new covenant, He unilaterally, accomplished that in Himself by becoming a man in Jesus of Nazareth, our Lord and Savior. That union, accomplished in Christ, accrues to us since we are "heirs of God and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ" (Rom. 8:17). Nothing more sums up the marvel and extent of His grace toward us than that statement. All that He is and has we share in Him by grace. As to your question about whose Spirit went into Mary to bring about the human birth of Christ, let me point out the importance of the truth of the "Seed" in Pauline teaching. Paul was given great insight into this mystery and much of his Spirit-inspired thought revolves around Christ as the Seed (Sperm) of God. When He wrote about the Abrahamic Covenant preceding and preempting the Mosaic Covenant He says, "Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ" (Gal. 3:16). Paul understands that God is Father and as such He is reproductive by nature and He essentially only has one Seed, His eternal Son, who is the source of our sonship. It is by that Seed that He begets us as sons. Now, of course, the begetting of the eternal Son necessitates a Female Egg for the Seed (Sperm) of the Father to impregnate and that gets us into the Mother dimension of the being of God that paganism and Romanism have terribly distorted. 

Of the many names that God uses to describe Himself in covenant relationship with His people, one name emphasizes what I have called His gender completeness. It is probably best translated as "El Shaddai," the Mighty, or Many-Breasted One and conveys the idea of the nurture and provision that a child gets at the breast of its mother. When God "makes love" and I say that with the utmost sense of awe, the Holy Spirit is the communion whereby the impregnation occurs and I am not saying that the Holy Spirit is merely a reproductive force. Since God is Pure Being; Pure Relational Being, that which flows within the God-Family is Pure Being, not just someTHING. He/She, the Spirit, is God in conjugal communion within Him/Her Self. This is the meaning behind the scripture that speaks of "The Father, from whom every family in heaven and earth is named" (Eph. 3:15). God names (natures) every family by that which He is, Family. Trinitarian teaching, though far superior to pagan ideas of God, tends to portray God as three separate persons though they valiantly try to avoid that. Whereas in scripture we find God portrayed as the Family-Being, who Karl Barth called our "Primal Origin" and Paul Tillich called the "Ground of Being." He is not a being among beings, He is Being itself and the source of all being. Our Lord Jesus was eternally conceived and birthed by the love and loving intercourse within God Him/Her Self and that same Seed is the source of our being sons of God. Our origin and destiny have to do with loving communion. To repeat myself, we have trouble conceiving of the Son's eternality because we think in terms of time, as if there had to be a point in time when Christ was birthed. He was birthed in that day which is the Day of the Lord and that Day always is and continually breaks into the space-time continuum. In the fulness of time that Day penetrated the veil between time and eternity and Christ was born of a woman but that was not the point of His coming into existence. That was the point at which the eternal reality was manifest in the flesh in a material world. Christ is the eternal Son of the One who is Existence Himself.

Because we were chosen in him from before the foundation of the world, we are also "eternal sons of our Father" (Eph. 1:4).