Shan Gastineau

Happy Are Shan Gastineau

The author has taken these amazing words of Christ and has put them through the suppositional filter of the high theme of the New Testament - that through faith in Christ we have been gifted a heavenly-birthed new self and new identity. This heavenly identity is often at odds with earthly identities. The teaser told by Jesus to Nicodemus that we must be born again, or born from above, was greatly expanded through the revelation given to Paul the Apostle. We are a new creation; we have died and our life is now hidden with Christ in God; we are seated with Christ in heaven; we are to take off the old self and put on the new self; there is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; there is neither male nor female. Christ's teachings from the Sermon on the Mount are humanly and ridiculously impossible to achieve ... without spiritual regeneration ... the Beatitudes included. Why not then suspect that these great blessings were informed by that prerequisite? This then is the author's theoretical and eisegetical interpretation of this incredible prologue to the greatest of speeches.