Before you read, it is helpful to recall that the central feature of the letter is chapter 2, verses 5 to 13. Specifically in verses 6 to 11, we have what is commonly referred to today as the Christ Hymn. The entire hymn is participatory because we are to share the same mindset. What kind of mindset is it? The answer is found in what The Christ Hymn pictures of the Lone Seed and His self-giving Life, even to death on a cross. Out from that death comes all the Life-increase, to the point that not only do people confess Jesus Christ bears The NAME, HaSHEM, YHVH, but also what the literal meaning of that Greek word is: speak the same out from the midst. The Mission of the Lone Seed from John 12:24 overlaps and overlays into the many He brought with Him out from death below to the above where He sits reigning at rest.
“And God’s peaceful-wholeness, the Higher Order Kind surpassing all human default understanding, will in union with Anointed-Ruler Jesus keep and guard your hearts and the result of what runs through your mind. Jesus, our Messiah-God, YHVH in a man, is at rest on His throne above. Repose well with Him. Do not get agitated by the temporal storms below. Default human does what default human is. The “born that way” human is cut off from eternal life-increase and using the tree of knowing both good and evil to stave off the termination of the afterglow of The Life that the first parents lost.
People are born to die. There is no True Life in the first birth. People from all ages have had to move within towards the witness of True Life. Today with Jesus as The True-Life-Path, we now can present Him Personally, so that humans no longer need to have inner dealings from God’s Witness left in His engineered cosmos.
People are blinded by The Matrix of knowing both fair and unfair, right and wrong, just and unjust as finite beings severed from the Path of Life-Increase, which always initially sounds like “lose your life.” The Dying Seed loses its life on The Path to True Life-Increase for others. Only God as uncreated and Infinite knows the pathway through that tree of good vs. bad knowing. He showed us the Roadway He is through it! Only conformity to the sound of His walking by the Spirit of His Day can carry us through and out of that tree.
Only union and oneness with His heart and mind frees us who are born captives. This why we are all “called out, ek-klesia” and on an exit-path, exodus, out from the land of first birth captivity. By being in God’s many-membered Son as Passover showed, we leave to enter in the Eden-land again. On the way, we learn conformity to the crucified life, Jesus’s death, just like how corporate Israel encamped in the shape of a cross around God’s portable Eden-tent in the wilderness. We can only enter by sharing Joshua’s view.
The first generation, the default “born that way” human needs to lose the captivity mindset and heart that promotes and identifies in the initial generation life you were born with demanding, “Mine, mine, mine!” That first generative way is not allowed into the promised Eden-land where humans and God can co-live. That entire flow from Adam-town must cease! That is how the second generation may enter the promised Eden-land. Only then, by dropping the “are you for me (good) or against me (evil)” shtick, are you able to take down the lowest and cut off the oldest human habitation under command of God’s type military force and flesh-hacking sword.
And it is an upside-down type of force: what default humans think of as strong military force and skill in the art of warfare, is entirely eroded and undermined by God’s type of force, which is perceived as weakness to the flesh. Yet weakness to the flesh trapped in the prison of good vs bad is the disconnect needed to leave the prison. Jesus opened the prison door on the cross of history. And seeing the meaning of Christ and Him crucified has ongoing ramifications as The Path out by Resurrection unto Life-Increase. The out-froming after burial of the old is His True-Path Resurrection Life out from death!”
Seeing Jesus as The Life of The Bible Stories 