1.2 Focus and Layout

© 2021 Christ Revealed Bible Institute

The guiding idea of this course is that Jesus alone shows us what a “human” is, that Jesus is the first one of our kind, and that we are designed by God entirely after His pattern.

For this reason, when we say, “mankind,” we are referring only to those who are conceived by an incorruptible Word and are children birthed out from God, that is, Christians. More than that, we refer to those who walk, or will walk, in the full knowledge of God through Paul’s gospel and who live, or will live, inside of Christ inside the Holy of Holies.

Specifically, we refer to those who live a normal human life. Thus, the guiding idea of this course is that living and walking just as Jesus lives and walks is the only normal human life.

Definition and Purpose. Humans are designed in the likeness and image of God. Likeness means that we are like God in such a way that God fits us and we fit Him such that we contain all the fullness of God, God and us in perfect harmony together. Image means that we are what God looks like when He shows Himself inside creation such that we reveal God to all, that is, the knowledge of God comes to others through us.

A human: Containing all of God and revealing God to all.

Since God designed us in this way, and after the Pattern of the Lord Jesus, our simple conclusion is that we must know what God means by “human,” that is, the Lord Jesus, in order to know the Father, that knowing God and ourselves must be together.

The Fullness of Christ. This course builds on the prior five courses in Symmorphy. For that reason it assumes a full knowledge of the ruling verses of the Bible, of the Covenant binding God to us and we to God, and of the Church which is the fullness of Christ in the earth. This course assumes no consciousness of any separation from God in the learner taking the course.

For this reason, when we say, “the human,” we mean that which is the fullness and the completion of Christ. The Greek ‘pleroo,’ that is, fullness, means unlimited capacity, an infinite meaning, whereas the Greek, “telos,” that is, completion or end, means there is nothing left out. The application of Christ to the human is without limit AND nothing of Christ is left out of that which is human.

Focus #1. The first focus of this course is that we are designed by the pattern of Jesus and that being just like Him is the human life. In fact, this statement is drawn from Romans 8:29, the ruling verse of the Bible. – Symmorphosed with the image of His Son, the firstborn of many brethren.

For this reason, when we consider God’s definition of LIFE, to know God and to know Jesus Sent, we equate knowing Jesus Sent into us with knowing ourselves, for our life is Christ. Every particle of who and what we are in our ongoing human life is Jesus sharing Himself with us. Yet in the midst of this wondrous symmorphy, each of us in person shares sweet communion with Jesus Himself.

The Model of Our Design. But our symmorphic nature is the second focus; here we want to consider the Lord Jesus as the model of our design. For that reason we must begin with weakness. A God who is meek and lowly of heart responds to the calling of a weak human Man sent out from Himself into the world. As this God enters into our world through this Man, He shows Himself to be like God, that is, He humbles Himself.

This weak human Man, then, carries all inside Himself, stumbling along the way, that He might join all humans with the Father inside His confused human soul upon the cross. Then, God takes that quality of God-Revealed and exalts Jesus above all others. – This is My revelation, Me as I am inside creation.

As He Is, so Are We. The Ekenosis, the path of the Atonement, shows us God; the Ekenosis, the path of the Atonement, shows us man.

It is evident that we are like Jesus in weakness; it is evident that, like Jesus, we walk in utter dependence upon Father with us. This is the foundation beneath, the bottom line of being human, that is, just like the Lord Jesus. Nonetheless, it is also evident that “all the fullness of Christ” is a mighty house of many qualities built upon that firm foundation.

The extent of Christ as us is without measurement or end. – As He is, so are we in this world (1 John 4). Complete – ALL that He is. No limit – We are the expression of an infinite Christ.

Focus #2. The second focus of this course is that humans are symmorphic in the same way that God is symmorphic. Because we are symmorphic, human “identity” is a significant part of being human, quite unlike angels or animals.

Jesus said, “I (a Person) am inside of the Father (another Person), and the Father (another Person) is inside of Me (a Person).” Then He said, “Know that I (a Person) am inside of the Father (another Person) and you (many persons, individually and together) are inside of Me (a Person) and I (a Person) am inside of you (many persons, individually and together).”

Humans, like God, carry more than one identity.

Human Identity. Neither angels nor animals carry more than one identity; they possess only one story concerning themselves and have no knowledge of any other. They never wonder about themselves. And thus Paul’s one definition of both God and man in 1 Corinthians 2 is the essence of being symmorphic, that is, a story of words inside a Spirit self-awareness.

What is called “human psychology,” then, is the study of the confused and endless patterns of the potential, in symmorphic humans, of many conflicting identities swirling together. What story do you tell yourself about yourself? What and who do you think you are? – As a man thinks in his heart so is he.

What we think we are, then, is the only “human” the Spirit of God can anoint with self-knowing.

Personal and Social. Inside this focus of symmorphic identities, we find ourselves in a context of two directions that seem at times to conflict. Those two directions are personal individuality and social interaction.

Everything of Christ with me I must know as complete in myself as an individual. Yet Christ by His very nature never remains as me only, but extends Himself out to include others together with me. The communion I enjoy with Jesus living inside of me, sharing all that I am with me, then becomes the fellowship we believers in Jesus enjoy together.

God can be revealed, then, only as our love for one another.

Focus #3. The third focus of this course is that humans can be known only by our relationship with God as our Father and that humans can be known only inside the context of a heaven-earth creation. To remove God is to remove the human from our understanding. To remove the human is to remove God.

We cannot know God without knowing ourselves; we cannot know ourselves without knowing God. And we know both only by heart, first, and mind second, with the mind only as a servant to a true and honest heart. And since we operate entirely inside this merging of the spiritual and the physical, heaven and earth as one place, we must know both to know ourselves.

God In. Humans are God’s passageway into His creation. Thus we can know ourselves in no other way but God-in and God-out, or, shall we say, God-through. 

To be human, then, is to invite God the Father into ourselves to share our lives with us. And yes, this is what the Bible teaches, and it has never taught anything else. God has given all authority inside His creation to us and He cannot violate our decision. Thus, for God to gain His desire to be known by all, we must first know Him IN us.

A study of the human, then, must contain a full and meaningful explanation of how God shares our lives with us and how we share God’s life with Him.

God Through. Humans are God’s passageway into His creation. To be human, then, is to enable everything inside of creation, whether in the heavens, as spiritual matter and beings, or upon the earth, as physical matter and beings, to know God as He is. And God as He is, known by all, is humans loving one another. As Paul said, “That the aroma of His knowledge might be seen through us in every place.”

A human is one who gives the Father full welcome of entrance through, that He might be Himself inside His creation as Love. This quality of God-through is essential to the understanding of so many parts of our design, things that have no meaning without knowing God-through.

Limited to Story. Great literary writers are considered great because of their skill of taking a very human character, placing that person in a context of time and place, and then taking that character through a development of circumstances inside and out that ends with that person being ‘split wide-open’ for all to see who and what they are in the great pressure of the ‘climax.’

This is exactly what God has done in setting forth the Great Story of God. For that reason, the only way we can know the human is to know ourselves inside God’s Story.

In every part of this study, then, we must find the human, what and who we are, inside of romance and battle, inside of home and journey, inside of solitude and companionship, inside of travail and victory. Story is the only way we know ourselves.

The Path Ahead. The first part of this course, “Focus and Starting Points,” contains three chapters including this one. The writer of Hebrews said “For the joy set before Him.” We must then ask the question – What did Jesus see? – For what Jesus saw, in the midst of His great ‘climax’ as He was ‘split wide-open’ for all to see, the joy and passion of His Heart in His greatest agony, is the only definition of the human for us.

The second part is titled “Pattern and Flow.” In this part we consider our human construction, made fully of earth and fully of heaven fused together. We consider our Source, from whence we come as well as how we exist. Here we also consider how personal and social are woven together and the nature of all our interactions as humans.

What We Do inside of Story. At this point, we attempt a first large definition of the human; this first attempt will be limited however. Then, the third part of our study is titled “Proving and War.” Here we introduce what it means to be symmorphic and the opposition found inside the great Story of God. We study the relationship between authority and power, between weakness and faith. We want to know the proving of Christ and the meaning of sharing Hheart with God.

In the fourth part, “Human Expression,” we study what we do, human action and interaction. To know what we do, however, we must look again at how we exist. Then we consider human training or education, our love for adventure, and for growing and creating things.

God Coming Through Us. In the last section of the course, titled “The House of God,” we consider the full reality of the Ekenosis, of God coming through us together to be part of His creation and part of our world. We look at our enjoyment of one another and our ministry forever.

The final chapter of this course, then, is a second attempt at giving an extended definition of the human, this time a definition as complete as we are presently able to know. The course is not completed, however, until you as the learner write your own extended definition of yourself, using what you have learned from the course, but making it all utterly personal to you and to your own life experience.

This Journey. This course, Symmorphy VI: Mankind, defines what it is to be human as God intends inside the story of our lives. The guiding idea of this course is that “human” means the Lord Jesus Christ and that we are made just like Him.

Yet we know what it means to be human only inside the context of story, a story that includes a great journey and much suffering of loss, a story that includes opposition and battle and victory. And we know what it means to be human only inside our companionship together, our fellowship as members of one another.

Our journey is to know God and to know ourselves.