cross_erebus

The reconciliation that needs to happen between sinful man and God goes both ways. Our attitude toward God must be changed from defiance to faith. And God’s attitude to us must be changed from wrath to mercy. But the two are not the same. I need God’s help to change; but God does not need mine. My change will have to come from outside of me, but God’s change originates in his own nature. Which means that overall, it is not a change in God at all. It is God’s own planned action to stop being against me and start being for me.  The all-important words are “while we were enemies.” This is when “we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son”  (Romans 5:10). While we were enemies. In other words, the first “change” was God’s, not ours. We were still enemies. Not that we were consciously on the warpath. Most people don’t feel conscious hostility to God. The hostility is manifest more subtly with a quiet insubordination and indifference. The Bible describes it like this: “The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot” (Romans 8:7).  But when we hear the gospel of Christ, we find that God has already done that [removed the guilt and punishment of sin]: He took the steps we could not take to remove his own judgment. He sent Christ to suffer in our place. The decisive reconciliation happened “while we were enemies.” Reconciliation from our side is simply to receive what God has already done, the way we receive an infinitely valuable gift.

Reflecting on this reminds me that salvation is all of God.  His grace is a covenant grace, one that is bestowed to reconcile us to the Father.  God is not patiently waiting or pining for me to do something.  Whatever I could do would not be enough to reconcile our differences.  As the Apostle Paul points out in Romans 8:7, we cannot do what it takes and nor do we want to.  Yet God loved sinners so much that he was willing to sacrifice his Son to reconcile sinners.  Isaiah the prophet spoke about this love in Chapter 53 of his book.  You can read it here

Questions:   Have you considered the love God showed that was spoken by Isaiah about hundreds of years before Jesus was born?  Have you responded to this love?

Quote from “The 50 Reasons Jesus Came to Die”.

Questions and reflections by me.

Picture – The cross at Mount Erebus, Antarctica, commemorating the 1979 Air New Zealand Crash near Mount Erebus.

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