Salvation Was on His Mind from the Beginning

2005-11-24

Since before time began, God had planned for the moment He would come to earth in human flesh and die for His creation. As He was stretching out the heavens, He was thinking of us, that He would have to travel the great expanses of space to come to us on earth, and suffer torture at the hands of the people He was about to make. He knew that we as people were going to reject Him, yet He created us anyway to have a relationship with Him. As He created Adam and Eve, He knew the implications of their rebellion that would soon come, yet He entrusted to them the Tree of Life. And when God was walking through the garden in the cool of the day, He perceived that the guilty pair was hiding. He knew the wheels of redemption would have to begin to turn, and had begun already. It was then that He swore to them that a Man would come from the woman’s body and conquer their adversary, the crafty old serpent. They did not know that the Man to be born was to be the Son of God.

Ever since, humankind has tried to live without God. They built cities to make names for themselves; they worshipped gods they invented because they would rather have control over God then to let God have control over them. Today it is the same thing, and we are all guilty of turning from God in an effort to become self-sufficient.

In everything we do, we try to preserve ourselves and separate ourselves from God. When criticized, we become defensive; we deceive people to make it look like we are always right. We constantly try to do things to add to our stature both physically and spiritually. We serve ourselves with wealth, we pride ourselves with knowledge, and we say that our ways and our culture are superior to others. If we do not do something well, we hide it behind something else that makes us look good. And because we are so self-centered, we quarrel to protect ourselves from others that appear to want to hurt us. Then big behavioral sins come out: lying, killing, extramarital affairs, etc.

If we are honest with ourselves, we do not have it together. In fact, we are very lost. I am very convinced that all people everywhere, including you and me, are capable of doing any of the most heinous, evil, malicious deeds. Perhaps that each of us as individuals are more prone to certain evil things than others, but we do have the potential to do all things that God finds repulsive, and we are helpless as to do anything about it.

That is why Jesus came from Heaven, was born in the flesh, and suffered and died for us. He came because we were so lost. Since we have violated His perfect standard, we were accursed from God, since it is written, “Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do them” (Deuteronomy 27:26; Galatians 3:10). Jesus became accursed for us and took away our sins, for “Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree” (Galatians 3:13; Deuteronomy 21:23). Jesus, the Son of God, took away this burden to absolve us of what we honestly knew all the time, that we are imperfect and are doomed to the grave. Since He was the perfect Son of God, He conquered the grave and rose from the dead.

Every day is an opportunity to see that we need Him and cannot live without Him. We see our imperfections in how we relate with the world, but we are also victims to others. The world is a violent and evil place that does not know the Lord, and it desires to write Him out of the history books, as if this were possible. We have no choice but to trust in Him. I know of no magic solution as to how to trust God all of the time in the midst of our hardships. But I do know that you and I both will choose to live the wrong way since we are bent on sin! By this we will slowly learn to not choose the wrong way to live and choose Jesus as the path to life.

If you do not know Jesus, the path to life begins when we recognize that we cannot live without God and that our ways are atrociously filthy before God. This is what is meant by repentance: changing our minds about our sin, both by recognizing it and agreeing with God that our sin is evil. We must trust in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the payment-in-full of our infinitely vast shortcomings.

This is the great comfort that you have if you trust in Him, that you are saved completely by what Jesus has already done on the cross and what He is doing in your heart. If you trust in Jesus alone to be saved from your evil works, then you can count on the fact that you will have everlasting life in heaven. God loves you so much that He gave His Son Jesus’ life so that you may live. He knows your name and created you to be His child. He wants to hear from you, and for you to trust in Him.

This message is for everybody and for all times. The good news of Jesus transcends all cultures and God wants everybody in the world to hear about His Son Jesus so that they can be saved from futility now and forevermore. “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come” (Matthew 24:14).