We Humans Have No Nature

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We humans are symbolized in the Scriptures as being containers, expressers, developers, but not originators. We have our “being” in Him (Acts 17:28) —the quantity, the potential (much like a computer). But then also, the quality of what is expressed by our being is not we, but He in His nature (like the programmer of the computer). Thus He is named “All in all”—not just the One being invisible, but having derived created beings by whom He can express His Allness. Not just the “All,” but also “in all,” which is why the coming of His Son taking flesh, and now, in the resurrection, still being “the man Christ Jesus,” confirms the eternal truth as being the Person in the persons, and not some vague dissolution of essence into essence as in a religion without an incarnate Christ.

These symbols used to describe us humans are all those which express no nature of their own but the nature of that to which they are attached. Vessels contain the liquid, but are not the liquid; the cup is not the coffee. We don’t, speak of a cup and coffee. So we are branches, but the branch is not the nature. Rather the nature is that, of the vine which reproduces itself in leal7 and fruit, form on the branch. Thus in Romans 6:20-22, we were bearing fruit of which we are now ashamed, but now the same branch (no difference in that) is bearing “fruit unto holiness” —solely vine-nature expressed by the branch, which has no separate nature of its own.

We are called temples. In the Old Covenant days that could have been the tabernacle by which God manifested Himself in Shekinah Glory, or alternatively a temple of Baal. The emphasis is not the nature of the temple, but of the deity who manifests himself by it. And now in the New Covenant, our bodies are the temple of the Spirit, and God is spoken of as “dwelling in us and walking in us” (2 Cor. 6:16). We are the body of Christ, but the nature is that of the Head, Christ, not the body. Only in the sense of the whole body and its actions (the Head included) is the “body” called “Christ” (1 Cor. 12:12). We are called “slaves” (mistranslated in the King James Version as “servants”). But a slave has no operating nature of his own in relation to his owner, and solely reproduces the activities of his owner, whether of Satan (sin) or Christ (righteousness) (Rom. 6:16). We are the wives reproducing the nature (seed) of the husband, and in that, sense with only the husband’s nature (Rom. 7:4, 5).