By Fred Pruitt
Once more, regarding God or Christ as “All in all,” when you mentioned you saw that as referring to the “ecclesia” I assume you to mean the consummation of all things. When everything gets wrapped up.
Certainly that is the sense of 1 Cor 15. And I don’t want to debate with you meanings of scripture, but only to share with you the Living Reality that it is to me.
When I say that “now” God is all in all, I don’t think I’m saying anything that isn’t presently true. Certainly there is the future consummation, referred to over & over in scripture, and something else yet to be fully revealed will follow that.
But it’s the “now” we’re concerned with, because “now” is the moment we are living life.
When 1 Cor 15 refers to God being “all in all” when the last enemy to be conquered, death, has been overcome, the sense of it is that the harmony of the universe will be restored, after having been disturbed and seemingly made dissonant by the rebellion of the wicked one. That jives with Romans 8’s “manifestation of the sons of God” and I am behind that view 100%.
Hebrews 11, the faith chapter we all are familiar with, I believe puts those who will receive it into same company with the people of faith listed in the chapter. We see the city afar off, and still live as strangers and pilgrims in this land, which still seethes with strife and sorrow.
But the key is in the first verse of the chapter, often quoted, one of those verses that seems to have limitless meaning.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
My point is this: in our faith, we already see the consummation, and live from it. The consummation of all things is God, all in all, and in & by faith we already see it and live as if it (and it truly IS) our reality in this present moment.
The scripture called Jesus “the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” (Col 2:9). The final day had not yet come when He came to walk the earth as Jesus of Nazareth, yet Paul calls Him, as Jesus of Nazareth, the “the fulness of the Godhead bodily,” meaning that the totality of the Godhead, the Father, the Ultimate Source, the First Beginning, I AM, was “contained” and FULLY expressed in the human being Jesus of Nazareth. FULLY EXPRESSED. “The fulness of the Godhead bodily.” In other words, we were seeing with our eyes, (or, for us, through the eyewitness accounts) what “God, ALL in all” looked like living as a human person.
This is precisely what I am talking about. Jesus lived from an eternally existing permanent complete Reality, which was the fulness and totality of God, from “heaven,” if you will, where God IS eternally ALL & in all. He constantly called “things which be not as though they are.”
Why? Because His “faith” was “substance.” In his “faith,” i.e. his reception without limit of the Life of God as the Life & Power within Him, the “Substance” of God outflowed from the Eternal into the temporal, which is a dim image of the Eternal. He SAW the absolute totality of God in every situation, and spoke what He saw inwardly into outward reality as the Spirit moved Him.
From where Jesus lived, (Before Abraham was, I am), God IS eternally All in all. All things are in harmony. There is nothing that defiles in His kingdom.
Yet He walked in a land where the sheep were scattered & were without a shepherd and evil seemed to rule the day. It REALLY seemed to rule the day they took Him & tried Him and then nailed Him to a cross and watched Him die.
If anything was out of harmony, sending out the most dissonant chord ever heard, it was the thud of the hammer and the agonizing of the holy body when the cold iron nails pierced Him through.
Yet in that chaos, that apparent total victory of evil, having killed the son of God as the wicked husbandmen killed the son of the owner of the vineyard, the total complete victory of Love, of life over death, of truth over lie, was won. The enemy defeated himself, and the plan of God to “bring many sons unto glory” was fulfilled.
The Cross tells us that NOW God is All in all. We walk as strangers and pilgrims, we see a City afar off, but in our faith, which is the SUBSTANCE of God speaking inwardly in us, we live in the fulness NOW. Arise, shine thy Light HAS come! Though there is a further fulfillment one day, for TODAY we see Him in His totality now.
We are told “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.” (Col 3:1,2). If we seek those things which are above, what do we see? GOD! Only God, for in the “above” GOD is all we can see. He dwells in His fulness in His heaven, and by grace through the Spirit we’ve been translated there, already seeing the fulness, already seeing the completion, already seeing the totality of God as the ALL filling up all.
There has never been a time or a place or an existence where that is not so, because the fulness of God is everywhere.
Back to my analogy earlier about the radio signals. Within range of a given radio transmitter, you can conceiveably be anywhere within the radius of that range, say 50 miles, and anywhere no matter where, you can pick up the signal from that station on your radio. The radio signal exists in its fulness no matter where within its range you turn on your radio. Go west, go east, go up, go down, into a building, in your car, the radio station persists. It’s everywhere without limit.
So also with God. He is everywhere in His fulness, without limit. There is no waiting around for that to happen. It already IS. But we don’t wait for visions or audible voices from heaven, but just simply believe on Him. And in HIM is ALL the fulness, where God already forever IS All in all.
As did Jesus, we speak that fulness which already IS into our strife & sorrow-filled world. The reason the world is in chaos isn’t because God isn’t “All in all” in it, but that the world is blinded to the already Eternal fact that HE IS EVER ALL in ALL and can’t be anything but. That is precisely what rebellion refuses to see, precisely what Lucifer tried to deny, in that he was saying that God wasn’t all in all, that he, Lucifer, was separate from all that, and had a self-sustaining life of his own. Lucifer’s fall came from an inner denial through the pride of his own selfhood that he was something in himself, and that God was NOT, for him in his present moment, ALL in all, i.e. the totality & source of who he was. His denial of the most basic reality of the universe cast him out of heaven by the self-darkening of his own mind.
But the crazy thing about all that, is that Lucifer’s “fall from heaven” also is a part of God being “All in all.”
Either He IS or He isn’t “All in all.” Not just theologically, not just at a later day, but in this present moment.
TODAY, if you will hear his voice ….
all my love,
fred
Voice in the Wilderness 
I have been thinking about your article the last few days. Since God is all in all, including Satan. My problem is not Satan, or other people or even problems themselves. It is simply do I trust God. The root of all my problems is unbelief. Maybe for me it is this: Do I have confidence that God is working all things, and I do mean all things, together for good. Let me eliminate any doubt about that, YES I DO. Jesus is the gospel. Thank you Fred.
Thank you, Stephen. Yes indeed, you are at the heart of things! There is only “one” with whom we have to do. No one else. Everything at some point originates in God by going out of Him as some means of expression, and then through the expression, whatever it might be, all things which have gone out, whatever they might be, are also found resolved and reconciled in Him. He is the One Who has come, Who Is now, and Who Is to come. There is no other!