Discovering Our Roots

Many people take great pleasure in hunting up their pedigrees, their family tree or their roots. There is always a risk in doing this since one may encounter some unpleasant character that could somewhat spoil the picture, but it could nevertheless add to the excitement. In any event, an understanding of our roots gives us a sense of our true identity.

My sister and my aunt have been great genealogy buffs. They have traced the Hodapp ancestry through a direct line back as far as 1637 in Baden-Baden, Bavaria. The Hodapp’s were Bavarian bakers. (I guess this is the reason that I love the bakery section at the supermarket. The taste for those wonderful baked desserts is in my genes!)

They have traced a very specific history of how the Hodapp’s came to America in the early 1800’s. They came ashore at New Orleans and began a trip up the Mississippi searching for a place to settle which, preferably, had a similar climate to their Bavarian roots. Some dropped off the boat in the St. Louis/St. Charles area and, for what­ever reasons, decided to settle there. The majority of the family continued north on the Mississippi into the area of Minnesota. The climate and the fertile soil made them decide that this would be their home.

We now know names and dates of specific brothers and sisters who made the journey. We know about events which occurred along the way such as cholera on the boat and attacks by Indians from the shore. We know about the rough times that the Minnesota settlement had in carving out a place in the wilderness in the heart of a hostile Indian territory. This information was found in a local history of the Mankato, Minnesota area written in the late 1800’s by a German Catholic priest from the area.

All of this information has given our family a sense of real Hodapp roots.

Of course, that great book, the Bible, gives us an even deeper discovery of human roots. In regard to Jesus’ humanity, the Gospels give us His family tree or genealogy, without omitting those shadier characters who helped to form the direct line to His birth at Bethlehem. There was Rahab the harlot, and David the man of blood - the murderer, a man of lust and pride and fear. These, and others who fell short of the divine ideal, were not left out of the record, but in each case were given a place of honor. Despite how dishonorable this pedigree appears, how wonderful to know that God has everything in hand, for “He works all things after the counsel of His own will” (Eph. 1:11).

We certainly are all aware that our family tree - or roots - might well reveal participation in evil as well as commendable actions. However, it is our hidden roots, our spiritual connections, that are more important in giving us our sense of identity. As creatures originating from God, what is the nature of our spiritual roots?

That we have such roots is certainly substantiated by Paul in his word to the pagan Athenians when he said, concerning the “unknown God”, “In Him we live and move and HAVE OUR BEING” (Acts 17:28). The apostle John affirmed that there was not a man who came into the world in whom there was not concealed the Light of Life (John 1:4). And Paul said that every person is without excuse in recognizing that there is a Creator God (Romans 1:19-20). Hidden in all is a God-consciousness! It can be ignored, or recognized and acted upon.

God does not leave His creation - man and nature - and become “God in absentia”, as would a clock maker who makes a clock, winds it up, and puts it on the shelf as something existing quite separate from himself. No, God’s creation is in a unique way an extension of Himself, a manifestation of His being. It is true that God is hidden in all His creation, but not absent. The “divine genes” are there doing their spiritual work. God is hidden in man’s consciousness, though He may be sadly ignored by man’s devotion to lesser gods. To tear man away from his self-chosen gods is the supreme work of the Cross, applied by the Holy Spirit.

Man is composed of spirit, soul and body - three parts making up one whole (1 Thes­salonians 5:23). I like to say that I AM a spirit, I HAVE a soul, and I LIVE in a body. The real root of me is my human spirit which is the foundation of my being, an eternal part of the spirit realm of God. My soul is my intellect, emotions and will which connect my human spirit to my body for material action. And, of course, my body is strictly earthly and material (although it will be replaced with some form of spiritual body in the future - see 1 Cor. 15:35-44).

Looking for his real roots, man can come to look into the face of Jesus Christ and there begin to see what has been up to then a negligible matter to him - the glory of the Family of God. The person who begins to tire of and turn from the lesser gods will begin to see that not only are his sins to be dealt with (actually have been!) but that his personal identity is inescapably threatened. Jesus died not only “for our sins” but AS sin: “He became sin for us” (Eph. 5:21).

The Bible traces my human roots back much further than 1637 in Bavaria. All the “family” names of Smith, Brown, McCarthy, etc., and HODAPP can be traced back ultimately to our first parents, Adam and Eve. Everyone’s human gene structure, as complicated as DNA has become, goes back to the egg and sperm DNA of these first human beings. Our bodies, souls, spirits had their human roots in the composition of these two first people.

Now what did we inherit from them in these roots? The Bible says that all humanity inherited the human spirit nature of Satan! (Gen. 3:14-19; John 8:38-44). Our spirit root became saturated with the ideas and desires of Satan - the Enemy and the Accuser - because of the wrong choice of our first parents in the Garden. We inherited the desire to sin, i.e. to be separated from dependence on God, our Creator. We inherited the effects of our first parent’s mistaken desire to live their own lives in their own strength. This was not an “anti-God” desire. I am sure that they still recognized God as a friend that they could call on when they really needed to. But they chose to attempt to be independent selves making their own decisions about life. Is this not what we see in the worldly people around us? Most are not “anti-God”. They just think that they can get along without Him almost all of the time. They look to their own supposed strengths to handle things. But of course, in a dire emergency, they then call out for help. They say that you never saw so many people praying in earnest as on the Titanic in its last moments.

So our human roots from our first parents consisted of the effects of their sin (commonly called “original sin”), but also included the nature and desire to commit our own sin - to live separated from God except in drastic emergencies. Adam and Eve had to make an original choice of roots - would they depend on God or would they depend on themselves - and they made the wrong choice. This established our human roots to this day.

This was the bad news! Now here’s the good news: like Adam and Eve, each one of us can also choose the root nature of our human spirit! WE CAN CHANGE OUR ROOTS! We are born with a SIN root nature; but we can choose to change our roots into a GOD root nature. And I don’t mean just temporarily - I mean permanently, forever!

This change in root nature is called “salvation”. It can only come to us by deliberate choice - in becoming persuaded by all the circumstances of human life that we DO need to depend on our Creator God. When we recognize this dependence, we are then shown by revelation the cross of Jesus Christ and the necessity of belief in His sacrifice for our sins.

As we repent and accept Christ as Lord, we instantly change our roots. The Satan nature is instantly removed and the nature of God replaces it in the Person of Christ who comes to indwell the changed human spirit.

Though I can’ t change the fact that I came from a baker in Bavaria in 1637, and I can’t change the fact that I came from the “loins” - the sperm and egg - of my first parents Adam and Eve, I CAN CHANGE MY ROOTS WHERE IT REALLY COUNTS - IN MY SPIRIT NATURE!

This recognition and acceptance of God’s foundational plan will begin to undo man’s self-centeredness and bring him eventually (still by trial and error after the salvation change) to the spiritual growth God desires in His children. Each person’s experience in passing through this process may differ in a thousand ways from others who are making the same quest for their roots. This discovery is often made through pain, as the person is released from the self life into an awareness of union with Christ. Man discovers that his “union” roots are in the eternal union experienced with the indwelling Christ - and with Christ’s own union with the Father. In the following scriptures, Jesus is clearly identifying us along with Himself in relation to the Father:

“The firstborn among many brethren” (Rom. 8:29).

“Chosen in Him before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4).

“That they may be one, even as We are one - I in them and You in Me that they may be made perfect in one” (John 14:21).

There are many scriptures that show that we are brought into that same flow of Divine union which the Son enjoys with the Father. We are therefore not experiencing some new solution to man’s problem, but are being engulfed in and embraced by the only union there is - the eternal Son-Father relationship. The ability to comprehend this was transmitted by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the comprehension continued with the teachings of Paul and John to the fledgling Church, and continued on down through the checkered career of the Church’ s history - always known to those who saw through to a reality far beyond the mere formal and much-embattled doctrines current in their day.

Today it is being realized more and more that we are not the product of a plan that emerged from God to meet a problem, but that we have emerged from that holy ROOT union of Father and Son and must at all costs be brought to an awareness of the wonder which is at the ROOT of the universe. The Father and the Son are referred to as “one Spirit”, and therefore “he that is joined to the Lord is one Spirit.” This is the unalterable ROOT of our being which can be anyone’s chosen spiritual ROOT. Human life is a schoolhouse of circumstances to bring us to see clearly that our ROOTS are in this absolute union of the Godhead.

In this eternal union in which we are participating, we are embraced by God as His real spirit nature children. Our becoming effectively aware of it, whether by an immediate or by a delayed awareness, is a matter concerning which many stories can be told, both of personal ecstasy and agony.

As temporal beings we date things from the historic events, and rightly so, for these are what arrest us and direct our attention to the eternal truths. Going back to 1637 family history can, in fact is meant to, instill a sense of inheritance of values. This sense can be used by God to draw us into a recognition of inheritance of sin or separation from Him. By this the veil is drawn aside for us to see what reality is in the work and presence of Christ IN US and FOR US and AS US. We date all this from Eden when the process of bringing light out of darkness began to be a working operation. This process has never been stopped through all history; it has flowed as the river of God’s grace through the centuries.

Paul says that we are to be “rooted and grounded in love” (Eph. 3:17). And John says that “God IS love” (1 John 4:16). Our eternal ROOTS are given us, for our beings are grounded in God!

For many, these theological concepts have been almost bypassed. For they, at best, have been the objective prelude to the total personification of our ROOT in Christ, changing for them what has been external formulas into a life-changing inner revelation - a transcendent God out there somewhere to an immanence, an awareness of union as a reality of the soul.

I am going to paraphrase my favorite Bible verse, Galatians 2:20, in light of my ROOTS:

I am crucified with Christ [I have changed my spirit ROOTS from Satan to Christ], nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me [I am no longer a child of Satan but rather a child of God], and the human life which I live, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. [We are ROOTED in Christ, and it is out of Christ IN ME that the fruits are grown and delivered.]

So ROOTS and FRUITS are all Christ!

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