DE-OTHERED - by Brent Lokker

The Good News is so astoundingly good that every time I think I have a fairly good idea of what Christ has done for us, God reveals the next wave of wowness! I realize that’s not a word in the dictionary, but I use it to underscore how fresh revelation from God is above and beyond and altogether better than what we thought we knew.   This past week, I uncovered a gold nugget that God left for me to find—one that blew my mind away and sent my spirit into summersaults of ecstatic joy.   In 2 Corinthians 5:18-19, Paul brags on God and shares something profound that has happened to us in Christ: “All this is from God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ and has given to us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their sins against them, and has entrusted to us the message of reconciliation.” (MEV)   That’s four times Paul uses the word reconciliation in one long sentence. That got me thinking, “I’m pretty sure I know what reconciled means (bring together, make peace, made right with, etc) , but let me dig in a bit to the understanding of that Greek word (kata-llasso) and see what I uncover.” This is the discovery that I call wowness:   The second part of the word, llasso, comes from the root word allos meaning ‘another.’ (already my spirit was starting to buzz in anticipation of what God’s Spirit was about to show me), but together with the preposition kata, it describes how something happened to us in Christ that made us ‘not another,’ or more literally, we were ‘de-otherized!’ I’m not sure if you’re getting this just yet, but God did not create you as ‘another,’ he created you in Christ ‘the same as,’ meaning you are ‘one with him!’ You were never another to your heavenly Father because he chose you to be his in Christbefore the foundation of the world (Eph 1:4).   How did you become de-otherized? By the choice of your heavenly Father, YOU were included in Christ’s death. “When Christ died, all died” (2 Cor 5:14) and the Trinity were determined to include you in Christ from the outset before the Fall even happened (Rev 13:8).   So, if we put this new understanding of reconciled into the verse above, it reads: “All this is from God, who has de-otherized us to Himself through Jesus Christ and has given to us the ministry of de-otherizing, that is, that God was in Christ de-otherizing the world (actually ‘the cosmos’ in the Greek) to Himself, not counting their sins against them, and has entrusted to us the message of de-otherizing.”   Paul isn’t mincing words as he strongly asserts that all humanity were included in Christ’s death and, as a result, are fully included as one with him. Our task is to let the world know of a Father who has always wanted each of his children and who created us in his glorious image and in union with him, never as ‘another’ or outside of him and his perfect love.   This puts an entirely new spin on the verse in Isaiah 42:8 that says, “I am the LORD; that is my name! I will not share my glory with another or my praise to idols.” It’s true that God will not share his glory with another. Isn’t it utterly astounding that God willingly shares his glory with you because you are not ‘another!’