Salvation
Read: Matthew 1:18-25 Romans 1:16-17 Luke 19:10 Romans 3:10 Psalm 14:1-3 II Corinthians 5:21John 10:10 John 3:16 John 5:6 Ephesians 4:22-24 Matthew 26:28 I Corinthians 15:1-4 Psalm 103:12
After the preparation, God Himself came into human history in order to do all that was needed to save mankind from a certain destruction. Jesus came because mankind was lost, totally swallowed up by the power of sin and Satan and completely unable to save themselves. The human race needed a Savior to rescue them. Whatever finite goodness man had retained proved far to weak to effect his own salvation. Man needed the perfect righteousness and self-sacrifice of God Himself.
As King David and the Apostle Paul so clearly taught, mankind has been completely ruined by sin. When they both stated that no one does any good, they meant that God counts man's weak goodness as nothing because it cannot help them. God accepts nothing less than absolute perfection and man falls far short of that. David and Paul were writing about the total depravity of man. Man's depravity rests upon the fact that he is totally lost in his sin, and his finite goodness cannot help him. Jesus came to save mankind from his lost and depraved condition. Jesus Himself would be the absolute perfection and eternal righteousness that man needs to escape from the power of Satan and live with God forever.
God's motivation for His desire to save mankind was His great love for humanity. God had compassion for fallen man struggling with evil powers within and without which he had no hope of overcoming. Even though mankind is totally depraved, he has not given himself over to evil completely as has the Devil. If mankind had so given himself to evil, God would have no desire to save him as with the Devil. God hates the Devil and all of his evil works, and God desires to cleanse and recreate mankind and His universe. For this reason, God enacted a backup plan for man's salvation should he choose to fall. God created a plan to send Himself into the world to rescue man by a method whereby He could cleanse mankind from his sin and give to man His own eternal life and righteousness, and recreate every human who would simply believe that He had the power to do this.
Jesus did everything that man needs for his salvation that he cannot do for himself. Jesus became the absolute purity and righteousness that man needs to be accepted by God. Jesus came as "the seed of the woman." He was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of a virgin, and therefore, had none of the original sin that has ruined humanity. Jesus led an absolutely pure and holy life and thereby supplied that needed perfection to which man cannot attain.
Evil always sees innocence as a weakness in the righteous that can be exploited to destroy Righteousness itself. Because Eve ruined her finite righteousness because of her disobedience, Satan believed that God's Innocence could also be exploited as a means to destroy God Himself. The great test of God's Love and Innocence found its denouement in the cross to which our Savior was nailed. Satan and the forces of evil believed that Innocence would become overwhelmed by the tremendous suffering, anguish and pain that evil could cause Innocence, and that as a result, Innocence would succumb to sin and God would be destroyed. The Father believed that His Son could bear the unimaginable pain and anguish that all of the sin of mankind would cause Him, and that He would emerge victorious over sin and death; thereby gaining salvation for mankind. The Father also knew that Jesus would have to bear this horrible test alone, without His help. If the Father helped Jesus then the outcome would have been determined by the power of God and Love would not have been tested. But if Jesus of His own free will bore the cross alone, then Love would definitely pass the test. Where Eve's finite innocence had failed, the Almighty and Eternal Innocence of God prevailed in the victorious cry of Jesus from the cross: "It is finished." Read John 19:30.
The means by which God would provide for the cleansing of man's sin would be the holy blood of Jesus which flowed from His cross. When a sinner repents of his sins and comes to faith that Christ's blood can cleanse him of his sin, then the Holy Spirit comes into his heart and washes him in the blood of Christ which separates him from destructive sin forever. This constitutes the first part of the salvation which God has provided for man. God separates the believer from his sin by the blood of Christ and thereby also forgives him.
Once a believer has been cleansed from his sins by the blood of Jesus, then God removes his sin from the entire universe. God accomplished this through the burial of His dead Son, and the descent of His Spirit into hell. God created hell for the destruction of sin, the Devil and his angels and the removal of all evil from His universe. Even though Jesus was pure and innocent, He bore the sin of the human race on the cross as if He were responsible for it. Jesus allowed man's sin to cause Him to die, just as it causes sinful humans to die. In other words, Jesus sacrificed Himself in man's place, bearing man's sin and hell. When the Spirit of Jesus descended into hell, He carried the whole sin of mankind into hell and left it there to be destroyed. The problem for unbelievers is that when they refuse to believe that Jesus did this for them, usually because of their pride, they choose to retain their sin, and thereby, they so identify their lives with their sin that God must separate them with their sin from Him and His universe forever. Those who accept the salvation that Christ has provided for them become cleansed by the blood of Jesus, and their sin descends with Jesus into hell to be destroyed forever. God then recreates the souls and spirits of believers thus separated from their sins. They become new creatures. The death and burial of Jesus constitutes the second part of man's salvation.
Jesus accomplished the third part of the believers' salvation by His resurrection from the dead. While Jesus died on the cross and was buried for all of mankind, He rose from the dead only for believers. Only believers can benefit from Christ's resurrection because only they have been cleansed from their sins and have had them removed by the sacrifice and burial of Christ. God cannot inhabit a dirty temple, but He can inhabit the temple of the believer's body whose spirit and soul have been cleansed and purified by the blood of Jesus. No person could have been saved if Christ had not risen from the dead. By His resurrection, Jesus proved that Eternal Love and Innocence has complete power over evil. He proved that evil can never destroy God. The resurrected and living Christ completes the salvation of repentent believers by sending His Living Spirit into the hearts of believers to wash them and remove their sins, to declare them to be eternally innocent of sin, and to give to the cleansed hearts of believers His own Eternal and Holy Life. Believers can do nothing for their own salvation. But by simply repenting of their sins and accepting by faith that which Christ has accomplished for them, believers gain salvation from sin and death, and eternal life and fellowship with God forever.
Whereas Adam's limited self-sacrifice had failed to help Eve and had merely resulted in his own fall from God's favor, Jesus' Eternal Love and Innocence and Self-Sacrifice succeeded in restoring repentent believers to the everlasting grace of the Almighty Love and Life of God.
This restoration of lost sinners to the grace of God constitutes a recreation of repentent believers. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil symbolized the disobedience of man and his fall from God's grace, but it also symbolized a finite retention of some of the attributes of God. But this retention in mankind remained far too weak to help him. The evil part of man had rendered the good part impotent. Mankind was lost in sin, under the power of Satan, and only Almighty God could save him.
God did not lose His love for mankind because He understood that the ruined goodness left in man could be recreated. Man could not recreate himself but God could recreate him. God could remove the sin of man, clean up his ruined goodness, and put it all back together so as to create a completely new man who would be filled with righteousness and love for God.
Evil believes that innocence in any life is a weakness that will always yield to exploitation and pressure. Satan counted on destroying the Innocence of Jesus on the cross. Satan thought that the overwhelming agony that Jesus would suffer on the cross would cause Him to sin and thus ruin salvation and eventually destroy God. Read Matthew 27:39-43. Satan's plan was revealed in the evil taunts towards Jesus on the cross. If Satan could get Jesus to save Himself from the agony of the cross, then he would cause Jesus to fail to save mankind, and thus cause God to sin against His own Love and thus destroy God. Satan did not know, but should have learned from his temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, that it is quite impossible for God to sin. God's Almighty Love can be injured, but never destroyed. God turned the tables on the Devil, and used Satan's attempted murder of Jesus as the means for man's salvation. Hear the victorious cry of Jesus from the cross just before He died: "It is finished."
God's process for the recreation of man is quite similar to His recreation of the earth as recorded in Genesis 1:2. The Bible clearly teaches that God's Spirit moved upon a dark earth covered with water that was there. The Bible also records that this earth: "was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." This seems to indicate that a former earth had existed that had been created by God. For some reason, perhaps because of Lucifer's fall to earth, God had completely destroyed this earth and had left it in a place that the Bible relates in Matthew 8:12, 22:13 and 25:30 as being "outer darkness." "Outer darkness" describes whatever lies outside of God's creative Consciousness. Reality can only exist within the scope of God's Consciousness. As Bishop Berkeley so accurately told us in paraphrase: "The universe is real only because God constantly observes it." This means that in the absence of God's Consciousness, the existence of the former earth had become equal to its non-existence when God cast it into "outer darkness." This earth had become swallowed up by absolute nothingness; that is, in a state of chaos. It non-existed nowhere and at no time. Only when "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" did the earth begin to regain its reality through God's recreation of it. In a similar way, God saw that the ruined goodness in man that had been swallowed up by the darkness of sin could be cleansed and recreated by Him. But this recreation of man would in no way be a restoration of the old Adam, but would be a creation of a new kind of human wholly restored to righteousness and forever devoted to God. Similarly, God did not restore the old earth, but created a completely new earth, but by also using some of the left-over materials of the old earth.
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