If God won the War, Why isn't It Over?

God's Multiple Remedies

During the brief years of His mission, Jesus was moved by one overriding desire: to reveal to a darkened world the light of truth about His Father. With godly exasperation, He chided His disciples for failing to see that His life was a revelation of the Father. More than 227 times in John's Gospel alone, Jesus makes specific references to the Father. Indeed, the key to eternal life itself is in knowing the Father as revealed in the life of Jesus.

"Righteous Father," Jesus cries out, "the world does not know you." He can think of no greater tragedy than that the One who most deserves to be known and loved has been monstrously maligned by the enemy. And so would we not expect that Jesus would want to strike right at the heart of the sin problem?

Paul recognized that the best news our sin-blinded minds could comprehend was "the light of the gospel [good news] of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God." He rejoices that God has made "his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ."

It is an unbroken theme, from Genesis to Revelation, repeated hundreds of times: The nowledge of God shatters Satan's deceptive power and is the foundation for all of God's redemptive work for mankind. Indeed, the truth about our God is what wins our hearts, reconciling us to Him. In Christ "God was reconciling the world to himself." God takes the initiative, God sends truth in His Son, who alone can fully reveal God. And the glad, free response of the now-enlightened heart is known as faith.

Faith is a personal friendship with God, characterized by love and trust. Faith becomes more mature as one comes to know God more fully. Yet one of the first truths God wishes us to know is how He views that death sentence hanging over our heads. In His own Son, He has borne that sentence in our place that we might fearlessly have the right of free access to His presence. Complete pardon, justification, forgiveness, acquittal -- call it what wever we will -- expresses one overpowering truth: past sins are no barrier to present fellowship with our Lord. That is His settled attitude toward all who have faith in Him. Not because any of us have deserved it by our performance but because He loves us. The only requirement: faith. Faith in a Person. Not even faith in the cross, but faith in the Jesus who died on the cross and thus in the Father who gave Him for us.

Faith not only changes our legal status from "guilty" to "innocent," it also gives God dramatic new access to change radically our inner selves. Just as alienation from God devastated our self-worth, so now the assurance of present acceptance by God rebuilds it. The ego-centered coping mechanisms which Satan had used to control us virtually at will are now stripped of there power. Christ's perfect love for us has cast out all fear of rejection by other. Our deep inner need for love being daily met by our loving Saviour, we are able to turn outward and become truly loving, unselfish persons. This growth in Christlikeness of character (which we often call sanctification) is not growth toward God's acceptance; it is growth within that acceptance. God does not love us because we are becoming more like Him; we are becoming more like Him because we already know He loves us! God's love is a changing power.

Now let's examine God's remedy for the problem of our sinful flesh. True, we will live in this sin-damaged body until death or until the moment of the second coming of Christ, when we shall all be changed and given immortal bodies. But while living in these weakened bodies, we still need not be mastered by them. As was the case with Jesus, we may joing Paul in saying. "The life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith." The enlightening, strenthening power of the Holy Spirit has set us free from the power of sinful flesh.

In considering the preceeding diagram, it might be worth noting that the word "sin' applies most appropriately to the second circle -- the broken faith relationship. If that problem is being solved and one is walking in faith, would it not seem strange to point to the existence of the sinful flesh and say that because it remains until the second coming one will therefore be a sinner until translation? Is "sin" a function of the mind and loyalties, or of weakened blood vessels and tired muscles? The problem of relationship can be fully solved in this life, even though the problem of sin-damaged flesh remains. And that is part of what Jesus came to demonstrate to us.

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