Thursday, October 16, 2008

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What's God Up to Anyway?

"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Every man and woman who has ever walked the face of this earth was created, following the pattern of the first two people, in the image of our Creator God (Genesis 1:26-27).  We all, every one of us, bear his likeness and his image.  And everyone we meet, while the image may be more or less marred in any given individual, is nevertheless an image bearer of Him.  That fact alone should lead us to treat each person we meet with profound respect and honor.  In a discussion of our speech and the trouble our mouths can get us into, James says, "With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God's likeness. . . . My brothers, this should not be" (James 3:9-10).  That is what we all share as part of the first creation.

As the verse above highlights, God wanted to do more for us than even the amazing things that he did for us through his initial act of creation.  And so he sent his one and only Son into the world to bring about a second re-creation.  "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" (2 Corinthians 5:17).  All people everywhere are created in the image of God.  Sin entered into the world and that image was marred.  God's purpose is to create a new people of God who not only resemble their Father but resemble the Son as well.  We are all image bearers of God, but not all are yet image bearers of Christ.  When we receive him, this second image is what is created in us.  And that is and always has been God's ultimate purpose since before time even existed, that there be a people of God, "conformed to the likeness of his Son" (Romans 8:29, see Ephesians 1:4).

"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!  All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:  that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them.  And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.  We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God was making his appeal through us.  We implore you on Christ's behalf:  Be reconciled to God.  God make him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:17-21).

When humanity was created, they bore the image and likeness of God the way that God intended them to.  With the entrance of sin into the world, and this would be true for each of us, we become unable to bear his image and likeness in its fullness.  There is something between us and God.  There is something that cannot be reconciled with the image of God and that something is sin.  "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).  There is a glory that we are to bear but sin does not allow us to bear it.  So Christ Jesus, the sinless one, came and made provision for that.  Sin has been dealt with.  It is taken out of the way so that we can fully bear the image of the one in whose image we were created.  That is what Jesus did when he was here on earth (John 1:14), and that is what he enables us to be able to do as well (John 1:16). 

Reconciliation is certainly about removing the sin barrier between us and God.  But it is maybe even more just about bringing us into alignment with what we were originally created to be.  In Christ, we are a new creation, and in some ways even better than the original.  We can fully reflect the Lord's glory.  We can fully show him to the world, so that others can enjoy the "being put right" that we have found.  The old has gone.  The new has come.  A true image bearer of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

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