The Community Life of God: Seeing the Godhead As the Model for All Relationships

MILT RODRIGUEZ

THE

COMMUNITY

Life of God

Seeing the Godhead As

The Model for All Relationships

THE COMMUNITY LIFE OF GOD

Copyright 2009 All Rights Reserved

Published by

The Rebuilders

admin@therebuilders.org/www.therebuilders.org

Printed in the United States of America

Acknowledgements

I wish to offer my heartfelt thanks to Pamela Holland and Mary Rodriguez for typing the manuscript. Many thanks also to Kevin Lyons, Amy Mooney, and Jon Zens for their helpful comments and edits on this work.

I would most of all like to thank the organic churches in California, Colorado, and Florida that taught me how to live the community life of God.

Content

Introduction 7

The God Who is Community 12

God’s Corporate Man 21

The Fall 29

The Result of Individualism 40

The Essence of Personhood 53

The Coming of the Seed 61

Life Within the Seed 69

The Planting of the Seed 77

The Second Adam 82

The Oneness of God 88

Diversity in Oneness 96

The Divine Relationship 105

Divine Possession 116

Togethering 125

Leadership 132

The Life of the Cross 142

The Life Comes To Earth 149

Walking It Out 159

Conforming to His Image 168

The Image is the Purpose 176

The Image as Mission 183

The Perfect Model - Conclusion 187

Introduction

This book is the result of many years of seeking the Lord for revelation. This is something which is so dear to the heart of God that I approach it with the utmost reverence and respect. When one approaches matters of the heart of God, then he realizes that he is standing on holy ground and must handle these matters in the most delicate way possible. These things are longing to be said, and thus, to be penned. This subject of God’s lifestyle and His image has been on my heart for years. But let me say that this has not been mere theory. There has been much rich experience to go along with the understanding.

There is so much to discover of this endless God of ours! We are all just beginning to scratch the surface of His experience.

There is a tearing down and a building up that I hope to accomplish with this book. By saying tearing down I mean that I am taking dead aim at something that has been with us since the fall. In fact, it is the actual direct result of the fall.

Our basic concept of God needs to be radically changed. If we truly want to know Him as He is and not as our minds conceive of Him, our minds must go through a major revolution. God will not fit into the mold of our finite understanding. Our God is much bigger than that.

The problem is that our minds think of Him in a certain way. We get into a mental rut in the way that we think of Him and it is very difficult for our minds to jump the track. We limit God to our understanding of Him. We really do need to have a renewal take place in our minds.

My hope is that by reading this book you will not only have a better understanding of the correlation between the life in the Triune God and church life, but that you will also be personally drawn to experience such a life for yourself.

What Does God Want?

"Then God (Elohim) said, ‘Let Us make man (mankind) in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’" Genesis 1:26

The best way to discover God’s eternal purpose is to look at the very beginning of the scriptures, before there was sin, and the very end of the scriptures, after sin has been removed. These portions of scripture would be Genesis one and two, and Revelation twenty-one and twenty-two.

These four chapters have nothing to do with the sin issue and are remarkably similar to one another. There, at the end of Revelation, we can see that God does finally get what He was after in the very beginning. But what exactly is that? We know one thing for sure; it does not involve sin because this is an eternal purpose that was in God’s mind before sin (Eph. 3:11). So, we cannot say that God’s eternal purpose is the salvation of mankind. Sin came later, after God already had His purpose. Yes, it’s true that God needed to save man in order to fulfill His purpose, but that was the means to an end. Salvation is only a small part of the story. God has a much bigger plan in view than just salvation only.

Before anything else existed, God had a purpose in the depths of His heart. This is an eternal purpose (Eph. 3:11) which existed before sin, before man, before creation. In fact, this purpose is God’s whole motivation for creation in the first place. Why did He create the universe? He has a plan. He has a purpose. He wants something.

If we look at the end of the book, we can see what He gets. He gets a city. This city is called the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:2) and it comes down out of heaven to the earth. This city is the fulfillment of all of God’s hopes and dreams. It is the fulfillment of His eternal purpose. But what exactly is this city? What does it represent? Can we even fully know the answers to these questions?

Yes, yes, and more yes! God definitely wants us to know and fulfill His eternal purpose. He wants us to know exactly what He wants! He not only wants us to know His eternal purpose, He also wants us to flesh out or live out that purpose in our daily lives. But it begins with a knowing. It begins with a revelation of His purpose.

God Creates Man as an Us

In Genesis 1:26 it says: "Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, and let them rule . . .’ Why does God use such language when He creates man? Why does He use plural pronouns such as Us and Our? Why does He call man a them"? Our knowing the answers to these questions is key to understanding His eternal purpose.

The Environment for the Purpose

Why did God create? What was the motivational factor in the creation? I think that we can safely say the He created in order to put His plan into action; to take the first step toward fulfilling His purpose. You see, there is the purpose, but then there is His plan to fulfill the purpose. The purpose is His goal. The plan is the way to achieve that goal. The apostle Paul speaks of this plan in his letter to the Ephesians.

"He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth." (Eph. 1:9, 10)

You see, He has an intention, will, or purpose and He also has a plan (administration) to carry out that purpose. The plan is called an administration or economy. The purpose is to sum up all things in Christ. This is because all the fullness was pleased to dwell in Him. (Col. 1:19) Therefore, it is plain to see that God’s goal is to have all things centered in Christ. But what are these all things? All of the universe! The fullness of the Godhead (Father, Son, Spirit), the fullness of creation (visible and invisible), the fullness of time, the fullness of the kingdom, the fullness of eternity past and eternity future, the fullness of the church. It pleased THE FULLNESS to dwell in Him! All of it!

This is God’s goal, but now we need to ask, how is He going to reach His goal? What is His administration (economy)? How is this economy going to be executed?

If we are going to understand God’s purpose and administration, then we will need to answer these questions. I started out this introduction by asking the question: What does God want? But we can only know the answer to that by knowing the answers to these other questions:

What did God want at the beginning? (Gen. 1 & 2)

What does God get at the end? (Rev. 21 & 22)

What does the city in Rev. 21 represent?

Why did God create?

Why did He speak as Us when He created man?

Why did God create us in His image?

What is this image?

How does God implement His plan?

You and I will take the rest of this book to attempt to discover the answers to these questions.

Chapter 1

The God Who is Community

We have a perspective of God that is bent and distorted. Our minds conceive of Him in a way that He never intended. In fact, this way of perceiving God comes as a direct result of the fall. Instead of seeing Him the way He really is, we see Him the way that we are in our fallen state. This is a major problem for us.

We desperately need a new viewpoint. We need to see things from God’s perspective. But in order to do this, we need to have our minds renewed. The old way of thinking will never do. We need to think with new minds and see with new eyes. Only with these tools will we be able to understand what has been in God’s heart since before eternity. Only in this way will we be able to understand God’s purpose.

The first thing that we will need to see will utterly shock you. It will shock you because you have probably never dared to think in this way before. In your mind you have formed God into your image and therefore, always relate to Him in this same way. But the first thing you must see is:

GOD IS NOT AN INDIVIDUAL!

He never has been, and He never will be. However, we think of Him as one, don’t we?

We are individual Christians trying to relate to an individual God. This is like trying to put a square peg into a round hole. It just doesn’t fit! God is not like us. We need to see who God is first.

I will say it again: God is not an individual. He is a fellowship of three Persons; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He does not think as an individual and He does not act as an individual. He is a community of three distinct personalities who are one. He is TRI-UNE (three-one), or three-in-one. There is only one God, but He is made up of three distinct Persons. These Persons are different but they are not separate individuals. They each have a unique personality, but they do not live or function as separate entities. Each one of these Persons is God but yet there is only one God, not three. The Father is God. The Son is God. The Spirit is God. Yet there is only one God! How can this be? Why is it so difficult for us to understand this? It’s simply because we think with the individual mind and something that does not fit into that paradigm just doesn’t compute.

But God has never been an isolated individual like you and me; therefore His thoughts are totally different from our thoughts (Is. 55: 8, 9). Since He is not an individual, He does not think like an individual. He thinks in terms of community.

The Community Viewpoint

God thinks and acts as a community, not as a separated individual. God is community, therefore He thinks communally. This difference in viewpoint has been a major problem ever since the fall of man. We believe that God thinks like we think and therefore we can understand Him because He is just like us! Not so. He is nothing like us and the only way that we will understand Him or understand what He says is by changing our viewpoint. We must see things from the viewpoint of God and this viewpoint is communal, not individual.

The divine threeness is not simply a declaration about how we experience God. Nor is God’s threeness merely the way God appears to us. Rather, the one God is eternally three persons. God actually is the Father, Son and Spirit. Just as God is characterized by oneness, therefore, threeness also belongs to the way God actually is.

Stanley J. Grenz

Created for Community

Baker Book House, 1998, p. 45

A good example of this communal viewpoint can be seen in the earthly life of the Lord Jesus. He never worked alone. He spoke the words from the Father. He did the works of the Father. He cast out demons by the Spirit (Matthew 12:28). Jesus lived by the life of the Triune God. He could have lived alone and worked alone but that