Why is our salvation through Jesus Christ by faith? This is a fundamental tenet of the Way taught in the New Testament, that our deliverance from our inherent human malfunction is by faith as opposed to achieving it through our own effort.
Belief creates reality. This is the lesson which Quantum Mechanics teaches. To observe an outcome is to collapse the wave function of any other possible outcome, rendering it nonexistant. The classic illustration is Schrodinger’s Cat, where the cat is either alive or dead in a sealed box, and the outcome isn’t known until the box is open and the cat is observed. Until that point, the cat exists as both alive and dead at the same time. By observing the cat, the outcome is created by the observer. To observe is to know. Therefore, to know an outcome is to cause it.
To believe something is to know it, whether or not it has been observed with one's sensory organs. Therefore, to believe something is to create the conditions for that thing to exist, at the very least, for you personally. If you know something to be true, you will of course behave in a way that corresponds to this thing being true. Therefore, the same will hold true if you actually believe something to be true.
Therefore, if you believe that the Spirit of Christ is grown together with you, you create the conditions for that entanglement to happen. Furthermore, if you believe that He is the one in control, you create the conditions for that to occur. In the same way, Fear, Anger, Cravings, and so on can interfere with this belief, this knowing, and the beliefs generated by these responses can also create the conditions for the outcomes associated with them to exist.
It is not a stretch to say that you are what you believe you are. You act and speak according to what you believe to be true, and create the conditions for that belief to become manifest in the real world. So, if your beliefs are governed by fear, anger, cravings, and so on, then those outcomes will become manifest. If your beliefs are governed by trusting in the Spirit of Christ within you, then those outcomes will become manifest.
Thus, salvation is through faith, because it can be no other way. Nothing else will change the reality we experience except belief.
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Here is a thought. Everyone is technically entangled with or in possession of the Spirit of Christ. Every human being. The "we" which Paul uses when he is writing is inclusive of all human beings unless otherwise specified. But the Spirit of Christ must be activated within us by faith that we are in fact joined to Him. That is, we must know that we are joined to Him in order to engage with His Spirit, and we must voluntarily accept His control over what we say and what we do, and surrender our own at the same time. In order to do that, we must know about it and believe it.
Baptism is the Sacrament of Faith. That is, it is the Rite of Initiation into the Way of Jesus Christ. It is a public declaration that you have in fact died with Him and are choosing to surrender yourself to the control of His Spirit. It is the psychological "switch" if you will that activates His Spirit and makes Him accessible. Therefore, as many of us as were baptized were baptized into His death, that just as Christ died and was buried, we too publicly declare that we have died and were buried with Him. And just as Christ was raised from the dead, we too, under the control of the Spirit of Christ, would be living our lives in line with His life as a part of Him.
Belief activates the Spirit of Christ, but He is already present in each and every human being because of His being born human, joined to every descendant of Adam by becoming Himself a descendant of Adam, and His death, burial, and resurrection. When Paul writes about having the Spirit of Christ or not having Him, it is this surrender to Him of which He is speaking, or perhaps another way of expressing it is being voluntarily possessed by Him and in cooperation with Him.
Just some thoughts this morning.
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