[You have come] … to a community of the firstborn.
Heb 12:23
This is going to be a rather short post, but one that illustrates an important truth.
The Inuit supposedly had a belief that there were many seals, but that each one was a manifestation of the one seal,???? the spirit of the seal. That is, the one seal was manifesting as the many. Apparently, the American Indians looked at the buffalo that way too. The manifestation was for the indigenous people to feed from them.
I overheard a pastor saying that Jesus did not belief in Jesus. He believed in God. But Jesus said that the father and him are one.
Jesus is the manifestation of God in the earth. He is the light, the truth, the life, the path, he is whatever God is, manifested as a man.
He is the firstborn of God, and the firstborn from the dead.
All this is the witness of the bible about Jesus.
But what does all this have to do with the Inuit story? I think, everything.
Jesus in John 17 prays that we might be one with the father just as he is one with him.
Jesus calls us the light of the world.
Jesus gives us the right to bind and loose, a judicial term as we have seen in an earlier post that constitutes right or wrong. He tells us therefore that we constitute truth.
The church at first was called “the way”, thus we are the path.
And the verse above tells us that we are called into the community of firstborns. It’s not Jesus the first born and we the brothers and sisters that follow. It’s a community of all firstborns.
We are manifestations of the firstborn on earth, just as Jesus was a manifestation of God.
That is, by deduction, we are manifestations of God in the earth. Just another way to say that we are made in his image.
Just like the spirit of the seal, God manifests on earth in us so others can feed on us.
And since God made every human being in her image, every human being is a manifestation of God on earth.
Now, let’s find out what the implications of this are. Certainly not an “us versus them” mentality with criteria of who is in and who is out.