A Faith that is not growing will wither and die. The beginning of a series on Faith.
Opening
The past couple of weeks we’ve been discussing the Resurrection of Christ and the effect it had on the people involved at the time. This week we will look at the reasons for Christ’s life, death and resurrection and their importance to our own faith. We’ll get more into Faith next week, but first we need to review a few key points upon which the posts to follow rely.
Why Christ Came
To explore this point, we must start with the source of all things, God. God IS the Creator. Creation is as much a part of who and what He is as our minds and our spirits are of us. He created the universe and revels in it. He enjoys it and is continually creating in it (and possibly outside of it as well). God loves His creations.
Similarly, God created Man to live in and enjoy the universe along with Him. And not only to live in and enjoy His physical creation, but to continue on and experience and enjoy Him in heaven after our time in the physical realm is done. God created us to be with and in Him so that He could commune with and enjoy us as we were to commune with and enjoy Him. We can talk about why He did all of this at another time. But for now, let’s just accept that He did what He did, and be grateful for it because if He hadn’t we wouldn’t be here to ponder these questions.
But, as we’ve discussed before (see Posts 4 and 5) for us to truly be able to see and marvel at His creation, to be able to enjoy it with Him, and to discern the majesty and wonder of what He had done and who and what He is, we had to have free will. Without free will, we would have been little better than microbes or earthworms, alive and functioning, but totally unaware of Him and incapable of having a relationship with Him.
And, along with free will came sin. The paradox of our existence is that for us to be able to discern Him and to be able to relate to and be with Him, we had to have free will. But because of free will, we are the only organism in creation (that we’re presently aware of) that is capable of sin. Because of our free will, sin is possible. It IS.
An Aside:
Some people wonder why God couldn’t have made us “sin-free.” Because sin is responsible for all the evil in the world, if he’d made us incapable of sin, there wouldn’t be any evil and we wouldn’t have to worry about it. For a much better discourse on this question than I can give, I’ll refer you to C.S. Lewis’ wonderful book “The Problem of Pain.” As with all Lewis’ writings it’s a bit of a “heavy load,” but the insights he gives are well worth the slog one has to endure to get through it. I don’t agree with everything he says in his book. In fact, he’s got one pretty wacky theory in there. But look past that and you’ll find a treasure that you’ll want to return to again and again.
To Continue …
Because of free will, sin is possible, and because we are human, we are going inevitably to indulge in it. We’ll have a more in-depth discussion on sin at a later time, but for now let’s just go with the idea that it’s there and we’re all going to use our free will to commit it. And when we do, we are separating ourselves from God and lessening our connection to/with Him. Because, sin is fundamentally our doing anything that allows anything other than God to be THE central reality in our lives, even for a moment.
Obviously, God knew that sin was a consequence of free will, and that like a new shiny toy, we wouldn’t be able NOT to play with (indulge in) it. Sin comes so easily to us that half the time we don’t realize that we are sinning!
If He gave us free will so that we could perceive Him and enjoy His creation with Him, but also knew that by doing so He was building in our capacity for sim which would separate us from Him and diminish our capacity to be in relationship with Him, what was the answer to the conundrum? Jesus Christ!
Knowing that we wouldn’t be able to deal with sin ourselves (we could and would try, but we would fail) some “outside” agency was needed to help us overcome the burden of evil and separation from Him that free will would place on us. We would need a Savior to help us deal with our problem with sin and to redeem us so that we could achieve the condition of grace and harmony with God and His will to enable us to fulfill His intent for us. So, He sent Jesus.
Jesus’ Mission
As I understand it, Jesus came with five primary things to accomplish. Those were to:
- Model and exemplify how a life lived in perfect harmony with God and His will would look like and require;
- Exemplify and model how a life lived in perfect relationship with others of mankind would require and look like;
- Enable our Redemption;
- Establish the Christian Church;
- Usher in the Holy Spirit to guide us after He had ascended.
I’m sure there were others and we can explore all the reasons Jesus came in a later post, but for our purposes today, we’ll simply agree that these five explain why He came and move on. But it is necessary to understand Jesus’ Mission to understand the next link in our logic chain. Which is …
Why Jesus Had to Die
There were several reasons why Jesus had to die.
First, His death enabled our redemption by satisfying the requirement that our sins be cleansed. Only after that had happened could we hope to have an eternal place in God’s presence. His death was the vehicle by which that was done. That is the historical orthodox view.
As I said in Post 7, there is another viewpoint regarding the redemptive effect of His sacrifice. Review that post if you’re interested in it. Which understanding you agree with is up to you. Whichever you choose, the effect of His sacrifice was to allow our redemption, or to put it another way, our reconciliation with God so that we could have the kind of relationship with Him that we were created for.
Second, Jesus had to die to affect the Resurrection. Without the resurrection His message would have faded into the mists of time and would have become another in a long line of nice but ultimately unsatisfying moral structures. The resurrection changed the world by demonstrating that He was unique, that He was the Son of God, and that all His teachings were true. Paul said that without the resurrection, there would have been no point to His coming in the first place (paraphrased). [1 Corinthians 15:19]
Also, it was necessary that He pass out of our world so that the Holy Spirit could come to dwell in our hearts. Jesus said, “…unless I go, the Paraclete will not come to you…” [John 16:7] The Holy Spirit is with us today to act as our guide and counselor. He is the small voice that urges us to behave correctly with one another and to reach out to God.
Finally, Jesus was the living embodiment of God’s intense love for us. His life and death were necessary to demonstrate God’s regard for us physically and to show us the lengths He is willing to go to affect our reconciliation and communion. He wants a fellowship and communion with each of us. And He was willing to manifest as Jesus in physical form and to die in humiliation on the cross to make that possible.
Concluding thoughts (for now)
So, Jesus’ worldly life and death were necessary to fulfill His mission here on earth and to open the heavens to us. All because God, in His infinite love for us, wants us to be able to live the lives and have the communion with Him for which we were designed. He wants us to fulfill our potential. We couldn’t have done it without Jesus then and can’t do it without Him today. Thanks be to God for Jesus!!
Well, I have run out of time and space for this week’s post and haven’t even gotten to my central point. Next week we’ll begin to discuss the importance of establishing and maintaining a vibrant and ever-growing relationship with God. But before we could talk about that, we had to talk about this. Regard this week’s post as a preamble to the “good stuff” next week.
Until then, I wish All God’s Blessings on you all.
Richard
October 12, 2018
