16.1 Conception
© 2017 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
I have included in this course on Covenant the three parts of the generation of life – conception, gestation, and birthing. Thus my original intention for Session 11. Life was to position our conception as sons of God inside the Holy of Holies. As I wrote that session, exploring many avenues of what “life” might mean inside of Covenant, I forgot all about this critical definition of life, that is, our conception.
For that reason, we cannot reference the formation of the Christ child in the womb of the Church without beginning with this further definition of LIFE – our conception. The very definition of symmorphy (and of God) requires us to see this conception as each of us individually AND as all of us together as the Body of God.
Romans 8:29. Because those whom God pro-knows, He also pro-determines them symmorphic with the image of His Son, into the purpose of Jesus being the first out of the womb among many brothers of His same kind (Romans 8:29).
| Transliteration | English | Root Form | Phonetic |
| Hoti hous proegnō | For those whom He pro-knew, | proginóskó | prog-in-oce'-ko |
| kai proōrisen symmorphous | He also pro-determined them symmorphic | proorizó summorphos | pro-or-id’-zo soom-mor-fos' |
| tēs eikonos tou Huiou autou | with the image of His Son | eikón | i-kone' |
| eis to einai auton prōtotokon | for Him to be firstborn | prototokos | pro-tot-ok'-os |
| en pollois adelphois | among many brothers | adelphos | ad-el-fos' |
The implication is clear – if Jesus is the firstborn from the womb, then we share the same mother and the same Father with Jesus.
The Seed of Our Father. Let’s be very specific, for we are dealing, here, with the Covenant. We are NOT descended from Adam. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. Now all things are of God (2 Corinthians 5:17-18a).
The Seed of our Father is also very clear. Having been conceived again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever (1 Peter 1:23). – Whoever has been conceived of God does not sin, for His seed remains in him; and he cannot sin, because he has been conceived of God (1 John 3:9).
Our Mother. Our mother is also very clear. But the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all (Galatians 4:26). From earth’s point of view, Jesus’ mother was Mary, but from heaven’s point of view, Mary, later born again, was very much a part of the New Jerusalem, the woman clothed with the sun.
The Spirit Word by which we are formed and energized is the incorruptible LIFE of God – whose name is also Jesus. Yet God, having brought us forth out from Himself, out from His own Seed of Life, has given us the outer form of the likeness of sinful flesh, just as He did with Jesus. This form is not our “placement.” Jesus was subject to sin because He was placed under the law; we are not subject to sin, for we are placed IN Christ IN Father.
Proving Jesus. God’s purpose for giving us an outer form of sinful flesh is different than His purpose in giving the same form to Jesus. For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit (Rom. 8:3-4).
God sent Jesus into the likeness of sinful flesh in order to deal, once and for all, with sin in the flesh. God sends us, made of the same quality of LIFE that is Jesus, into the likeness of sinful flesh in order to PROVE Jesus faithful and true.
God Seeing. I have been pondering the slightly different shade of meaning, now, between my incorrect translation of “pro-determined to be symmorphosed with” and the present form of “pro-determined symmorphic with.” Proorisen includes the thought of seeing the full outline of the destination. Thus symmorphic as an adjective becomes that which God sees already to be our reality. This seeing corresponds with creation – and God saw that it was good.
This seeing of God comes after the procreation, turning that which God brings forth in the direction of God’s intentions. Thus pro-knowing is the seed of procreation.
An Incorruptible Sperm. This is the context. Now, let’s investigate just exactly what our conception is. Let me focus and restate 1 Peter 1:23 from the Greek. Having been conceived from above out from an incorruptible Sperm, carried to us through the living and abiding Word of God. This is identical to Ephesians 3:17, Christ lives in our hearts through faith, though more specific.
Now, the Jesus who walked this earth was NOT incorruptible. Incorruptible means CANNOT know sin or death. Jesus became this incorruptible seed by the resurrection from the dead (Romans 1:4).
Source – Bridge – Destination. As you can see, we are merging three verses into the same picture, Romans 8:29, Ephesians 3:17, and 1 Peter 1:23. Romans 8:29 includes God’s side of things. Eph. 3:17 presents our side of things. And 1 Peter 1:23 is the bridge from one to the other.
Rom. 8:29 gives us the source of the Seed – the pro-knowing of God, and the end purpose of God – image – God Himself seen and known by His creation. Eph. 3:17 gives us the destination of the Seed – Christ in our hearts, and our part of the passage – through faith. And 1 Peter 1:23 is the bridge, the passage of God’s Sperm, through the living and abiding Word of God.
Impregnation. Let’s add a fourth element to our picture, what this Word, Christ Jesus, is doing inside of us – with the use of two specific words and the many New Testament references in which they are found. Energeia and Fellowship.
Consider the following representation of our impregnation.
A Living Spirit Word. We also picture this living and abiding Word coming through our faith into our hearts as the Pillar of Fire or the Birkeland Current flowing into us, that is a Living Spirit Word.
We are very familiar with this incorruptible Word, for it is all those wondrous verses we have been perusing our whole lives and it is this Jesus who is our dearest Friend. We have never known what these precious Bible verses ARE! In fact, the more I write, the more the subject matter increases before me so that I almost despair of completing this task in a thousand years, for I know that the Word ahead of me a thousand years from now will be far larger than the overwhelming increase I see now.
Living and Abiding. The words “living” and “abiding” in themselves contain unending study and an increasing number of verses to peruse in order to obtain just a brief introduction to their meaning.
But here is the biggest thing we must KNOW about this “living and abiding” Word flowing into us. This Word is continuous God-energy. And God-energy is alternating current, waves of LIFE flowing constantly from God’s pro-knowing Heart to Christ in our hearts and back again. You and I are, to say the least, electrified.
And the second biggest thing that we must KNOW about this alternating current energeoing us is that it is God’s SPERM.
Generated. God’s Sperm MEANS that the Christ alive in our hearts is the very Christ, the Son of the living God. And this Christ, the Son of the living God, lives now as us. We are, to put it short, born again. In exactly the same way that God is Jesus’ Father, so God is our Father.
The original creation was created, that is, it was the work of God’s hands. We are not created, but generated, that is, we are coming forth continuously out of the inner Being of the Almighty. God as He IS, now appears through us as we ARE, that is, symmorphic with the image of His Son.
Simple and Ordinary. Now, if you have any hat remaining on your head or socks on your feet, I do not know how that could be, for mine are completely blown away. For we remain simple and ordinary human beings, the very image of the Father.
I looked up reference to the Greek word, meno, here as the “abiding” Word, and found a vast panorama of SEED flowing into us from God, just from that one word, SEED that included my assertion that God gave us the likeness of sinful flesh in order for Jesus to prove Himself faithful and true. Alas, this session is on the gestation in the womb, however, and not on conception. And thus we must proceed to a different panorama of WORD in the next lesson.
A Vision of a Tree. In the remainder of this lesson, however, I want to share an important thought concerning all the Word God speaks.
When Sam Fife began his ministry of establishing the revelation of Jesus Christ in the hearts of God’s people, sometime in the late 1960’s, God gave him a vision that has stayed with me, governing my own framework of thinking. Sam Fife saw, in a vision, a large tree. The problem with the tree was that all of the branches were stuck in all the wrong places so that the tree was entirely wrong. Then, a great wind blew and stripped all the branches from the tree. After they were all stripped off, however, they all settled back down into their rightful place. The tree was now in perfect symmetry, beautiful and complete.
A Tree of Death. Paul said it this way: Rightly dividing the Word of Truth. I understood that asymmetrical tree completely when I read a bit from John Calvin’s Institutes, seeing in his arguments the same wrongly tacked-together word that took control of the move of God fellowship after Sam Fife died.
You see, in that argument, an argument I find re-iterated in all of the Bible dictionaries and theological explanations of these words and verses we are studying, I see all the branches of God’s Word, all the verses, all the wondrous expressions of Christ – ALL in the wrong place, all stuck together in an organization of thought that is NOT God’s. It all sounds convincing, yet it contains ONLY the way of death, Word as the tree of knowledge.
A Tree of Life. I can say now, with all sincerity, that my mind and my heart contain that perfect symmetrical tree Sam Fife saw at the end of his vision.
You see, it’s all the same Word. We do not hear a different Word. But we have put all the Words God speaks into their Godly place in our understanding – as Jesus, the Tree of Life. Thus we see all these same words from the Bible in a completely different place than our brethren using the same words. And we discover, in this totally different arrangement, that all these Words are speaking of something quite different than what our brethren hear.
We hear ONE thing coming to us through every Word: Christ lives in our hearts through faith.