Kingdom Conversations

Have you ever been in love? Do you remember the intensity, the constant thoughts, and the deep longing you felt for the one you cherished?

Have you stopped to consider is that this is how Christ feels about you—personally?! This breathtaking reality runs throughout the scriptures, yet much of our church tradition and teaching has painted a far more distant and demanding picture of God, a picture of someone that expects us to repent continually rather than return His love and hug Him back.

What if the gospel is not simply the story of fallen humanity trying to find its way back to God, but the unveiling of an astonishing reality: Christ was there before the Fall, all creation came into being through Him, “in Him all things hold together,” and “in Him we live and move and have our being.”

What if we have spent much of our Christian lives trying to get closer to a God in whom we already exist? What if this is a joyful dance filled with love and experienced in union?

Justin Paul Abraham is a Christological Kingdom forerunner and modern day mystic. He calls this an awakening to cosmic union—the discovery that Father, Son, and Spirit are not standing outside creation waiting for us to reach them. The eternal dance of divine love has always been larger than us, and in Christ, humanity and creation have been drawn into that communion.

Scripture describes God reconciling the world to Himself, Jesus praying forgiveness from the cross, and even the Song of Solomon portraying a God whose heart is ravished by His beloved. Could the deepest story of the gospel be not separation, but Love relentlessly overcoming our experience of separation?

This teaching challenges some deeply embedded religious assumptions about the Fall, salvation, heaven, hell, and our relationship with God—but it also reaches backward into Scripture and the writings of ancient Christian mystics who spoke boldly of union, participation, divine love, and Christ understood at a cosmological level.

Before dismissing that language as something new (it’s not!), it may be worth asking a more provocative question: What if we are not being invited to find a distant God at all—but to awaken to the One in whom we have been held all along? The study notes are helpful for reviewing the rich content of Justin’s presentation and considering both scripture and the ancient church fathers in light of this understanding.

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