{"id":17815,"date":"2019-02-21T08:09:37","date_gmt":"2019-02-21T13:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=17815"},"modified":"2019-02-21T08:17:09","modified_gmt":"2019-02-21T13:17:09","slug":"the-first-incarnation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=17815","title":{"rendered":"The First Incarnation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Christ Since the Beginning<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/cac.org\/the-first-incarnation-2019-02-21\/\"><strong>The First Incarnation<\/strong><\/a><br>\n<strong>Thursday, February 21, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kbsRIcihwcE\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n<p>The first Incarnation of God did not happen in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. That is just the moment when it became human and personal, and many people <em>began to take divine embodiment as a serious possibility<\/em>. The initial Incarnation actually happened around 14 billion years ago with \u201cThe Big Bang.\u201d That is what we now call the moment when God decided to&nbsp;<em>materialize<\/em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>self-expose,<\/em>at least in this universe. The first \u201cidea\u201d in the mind of God was to make Divine Formlessness into physical form, so that everything visible is a further revelation of what has been going on secretly inside of God from all eternity. Love always outpours! God spoke the Eternal Blueprint\/Idea called&nbsp;<em>Christ,<\/em>\u201cand so it was!\u201d (Genesis 1:9).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Two thousand years ago marks the Incarnation of God in Jesus, but before that there was the Incarnation through light, water, land, sun, moon, stars, plants, trees, fruit, birds, serpents, cattle, fish, and \u201cevery kind of wild beast\u201d according to the Genesis creation story (1:3-25). This is the \u201cCosmic Christ\u201d through which God has \u201clet us know the mystery of God\u2019s purpose, the hidden plan made from the beginning&nbsp;<em>in Christ<\/em>\u201d (Ephesians 1:9-10). Christ is not Jesus\u2019 last name, but the title for his life\u2019s purpose. Christ is our word for what Jesus came to personally reveal and validate\u2014which is true all the time and everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Most of Christian history has heard little or nothing about this timeless mystery, and we settled for a small tribal god instead. We put Jesus in competition with other religions instead of allowing him to ground the universal search for God in the material world itself, in nature, cosmos, and history\u2014from the very beginnings of time. In other words, all creatures were capable of knowing and loving God long before the world religions formalized their doctrines and rituals (see Romans 1:20). Were the first millennia of human beings (San or Bushmen, Mayans, Celts, Aboriginals, and on and on) just trial runs and throwaways for a very inefficient God? That cannot be! God did not just start talking and loving 2,000 years ago. Infinite Love would never operate that way. \u201cThe Christ Mystery\u201d proclaims that there is universal and equal access to God for all who have ever wanted love and union since the primal birth of humanity. In simple words, Stone Age people already had access to God!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As Colossians puts it: \u201cChrist is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation\u201d (1:15); Christ is the one glorious icon that names and reveals the entire arc of history. \u201cThe fullness is founded in Christ . . . everything in heaven and everything on earth\u201d (Colossians 1:19-20). It gets better: <em>God has never stopped thinking, dreaming, and creating the Christ, as this one mystery continues to unfold and evolve in time<\/em>(see Romans 8:19-25)<em>. All of us are meant to be \u201cthe second coming of Christ,\u201d but how can we recognize or honor this without recognizing both the first (creation) and the second (Jesus) Incarnations?<\/em> <em>(See John 1:9-11 and note the active participle verb: The Light <\/em><em>was coming<\/em><em> into the world. We now call that evolution.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Christ Since the Beginning The First Incarnation Thursday, February 21, 2019 The first Incarnation of God did not happen in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. That is just the moment when it became human and personal, and many people began to take divine embodiment as a serious possibility. The initial Incarnation actually happened around 14 billion [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17815"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17815"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17818,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17815\/revisions\/17818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}